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Watch: Mysterious white flash lights up the sky over Kiev
A mysterious flash that lit up the sky over the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, sparked much speculation.
Officials in Kiev said they suspected it was a Nasa satellite that fell to Earth, but the US space agency told the BBC it was still in orbit.
The Ukrainian Air Force suspected that the lightning could have been a meteorite.
Whatever it was, the Luftwaffe seemed confident it hadn’t been caused by a Russian airstrike — an event all too familiar since last year’s invasion.
The bright glow was observed in the sky over the capital around 10:00 p.m. (19:00 GMT).
An air raid alert was activated, but “air defenses were not deployed,” Kyiv’s military administration head Serhiy Popko told Telegram.
“According to preliminary information, this phenomenon was the result of the crash of a Nasa space satellite to Earth,” Popko said.
The US space agency announced earlier this week that a decommissioned 660-pound (300 kg) satellite would reenter the atmosphere on Wednesday.
The RHESSI spacecraft, used to observe solar flares, was launched into low Earth orbit in 2002 and decommissioned in 2018, Nasa said.
But Rob Margetta of NASA’s Office of Communications told the BBC the satellite was still in orbit when the flash was observed and would re-enter Earth’s atmosphere during the night.
Nasa and the US Department of Defense continued to track RHESSI, he added.
Ukrainian social media has been rife with theories and memes about what the Flash could have been, with a popular theme being that it was caused by aliens.