What the flying flash was that?
Stunned diners at famed Japanese eatery Nobu in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, dropped their chopsticks in awe when a mysterious body of shooting objects cascaded across the night sky during an outdoor dinner service earlier this month.
“What the f–k is that?” repeatedly questioned a shocked witness of the celestial phenomenon, which was recorded and shared to TikTok by user Nicky Beezer.
In the cosmic clip, which has amassed over 6.5 million views, the flickering heavenly body travels through space for several seconds as stupefied onlookers gasp and gawk at the sight.
And digital audiences were equally dazed by the mystifying marvel.
“I need a real educated [response] please! what is that?” penned one perplexed commenter.
“Is this real? I seen it a few times like damn I hope it’s aliens to take us back to our real planet lol,” wrote another.
Other keyboard comics made light of the starry rarity, saying: “Imagine being drunk out of your mind at a Mexican beach and you see this in the sky” and “I would drive to wherever that lands and make some jewelry out of it.”
But the joking subsided when purported astrobiology Ph.D. candidate and NASA fellow Lena Vincent chimed in with her explanation of the evening sky event.
“That is almost certainly one of the @SpaceX Starlink satellites that didn’t make it to their proper orbit because of a geomagnetic storm,” she commented, referring to a band of specialized internet satellites that business magnate Elon Musk, 50, recently launched into outer space via his SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
So far, neither Musk nor reps for SpaceX have openly commented on the starry flare featured in this video.
But Emily Calandrelli, an MIT engineer and the star of the educational Netflix series “Emily’s Wonder Lab,” seemed to confirm Vincent’s theory on her own verified TikTok account.
“This is most likely Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite,” said Calandrelli, 34, in her trending response video. “So this is actually a pretty wild story involving a burp from the sun, costing SpaceX potentially $100 million.”
She went on to explain that “the very next day” after SpaceX’s launch of approximately 49 satellites into space last week, “the sun burped a bunch of energetic particles our way, causing something known as a geomagnetic storm.”
Calandrelli continued: “This storm thickened the atmosphere in [the lower orbits where the satellites were launched], making the atmosphere drag even higher.
“And that ultimately caused the demise of about 40 of those satellites,” she added. “And that’s what you probably saw in the sky.”
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