The residents of Sydney, Australia have witnessed a weird-looking phenomena as a group of bright lights travelled through the night sky, sparking rumours of the UFOs. The strangest thing was that they moved in a straight line, practically without space in between them.
The non-typical UFO behaviour, however, was soon explained: it was a new group of Starlink satellites being deployed in low-Earth orbit. These devices have sun batteries on board that can reflect the sun's light to the ground at certain angles and during certain parts of the day, for example at around 4pm, as was the case with the sighting in Sydney this weekend.
The lights' straight flying pattern, in turn, is explained by their novel deployment method, according to Brad Tucker - an Australian National University astrophysicist, who commented on the phenomena for the Sydney Morning Herald.
"Each dot is an individual satellite launched metres apart, before slowly spreading out by hundreds of metres. We're talking about a fairly close formation in a very tight orbit, and this is because they want this global [broadband] coverage", Tucker said.
The 53 new satellites, launched from Cape Canaveral spaceport in Florida, US will further strengthen the constellation of over 4,000 devices circling Earth and providing internet access via ground-based Starlink receiving consoles. Starlink is a project of SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, and uses the space company's cheaper renewable rockets to deploy thousands of satellites to the orbit.
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