What Was That Weird White Streak in the Sky During the Aurora?

On May 17, the night sky tricked America’s amateur astronomers into thinking something much more fascinating and rare was occurring than it was, even though what was happening was still pretty cool. Two separate celestial events happened simultaneously: a geomagnetic storm and a mysterious, beautiful ghostly-white streak slicing through the sky.

A medium-strength geomagnetic storm lit up the upper atmosphere with auroras from solar material that, according to scientists, was supposed to miss Earth entirely. A coronal mass ejection, or CME, from a solar filament eruption four days earlier turned out to be wider than expected. It hit the earth, lighting up the skies with a gorgeous and powerful aurora.

Stargazers like Reddit user Electric_Sand_1592, who caught some stellar photos of the event, had their eyes on the skies on Saturday night, soaking in the gorgeous green and purple auroras when a streak of white tore across the skies. Theories exploded across the internet, but it wasn’t an alien invasion or a rip in the fabric of space-time.

Mike Lewinski, an Aurora photographer from Crestone, Colorado, caught it all as it unfolded. “The aurora was rippling low on the northern horizon when suddenly a bright streak of light, reminiscent of a rocket re-entry, appeared high in the sky and flowed down to the horizon,” Lewinski told Spaceweather.com. He was correct.

The streak was courtesy of China’s private aerospace company, Landscape, which had launched its methane-powered Zhuque-2E rocket about an hour earlier from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. The rocket was there to deploy six satellites, and the plume was likely from a de-orbit or fuel-dump burn as the upper stage passed over the Four Corners area at around 155 miles above Earth. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell confirmed the fuel dump theory on X (formerly Twitter).

Other photographers across New Mexico and Kansas captured the eerie plume, some mistaking it for STEVE. That is not the name of just some guy, but rather a celestial phenomenon that produces green and purple haze that looks a lot like an aurora and can sometimes appear alongside auroras.

So, no. There was no massive, inexplicable apocalyptic phenomenon occurring. Occam’s Razor remains undefeated, especially when explaining mysterious celestial phenomena. As Freud (may have) once said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Sometimes, a bright white streak tearing through an aurora is just the streak left behind by a Chinese rocket. Still a pretty cool sight nonetheless.