People living in the Pacific Northwest were captivated Thursday night by the sight of what looked like a clump of meteors slowly streaking across the night sky.
Many guessed that the lights were bits of space junk, remnants of a plane that had exploded or some sort of natural event.
It could be seen in parts of Oregon and Washington.
It turned out to be debris from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket breaking into pieces and burning up.
The National Weather Service in Seattle wrote on Twitter that the rocket's debris had re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere at the wrong angle, causing it to burn up.
The rocket was delivering Starlink satellites into orbit.
