Fifteen-year-old photographer Jonathan Burnett snapped a digital photo of a bright light sailing through the sky, and another amateur photographer caught the same image from a different angle. These photos have scientists around the world mystified about what the mysterious light was, since it turns out it wasn’t a meteor.
Burnett, who lives in Wales, was photographing his friends when he saw a colorful fireball in the sky. He assumed it was a meteor, snapped a photo, and send it to NASA. NASA’s Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell posted the photograph on Space.com on Oct. 1st, saying that “a sofa-sized rock came hurtling into the nearby atmosphere of planet Earth and disintegrated.” They called the picture “one of the more spectacular meteor images yet recorded.” But it turns out they were wrong?it wasn’t a meteor, after all.
Some people said it was a hoax, while others thought it might be space junk re-entering the atmosphere, or a military jet unloading fuel and igniting it with its afterburners. Aircraft engineer Steve Salter says it may have been a contrail from the Concorde, which was in the vicinity at the right time. Marco Langbroek of the Dutch Meteor Society thinks it could be what’s known as a false Sun, when light from the setting Sun is refracted by the ice particles that make up a high-altitude contrail from a jet exhaust.
Then NASA discovered that a second photo had been taken of the same mysterious object by Julian Heywood, who lives about 10 miles from Jonathan. This ruled out the possibility that Burnett’s photo could have been a hoax.
“We have lost count of the number of people who have emailed us with various explanations of what the picture could be of,” says Paul Burnett, Jonathan’s father. “A 15-year-old schoolboy has baffled scientists around the world with this picture.”
There are people with special abilities who could solve this mystery for us.
To see Heywood photo, 0.jpg,click here.
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