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A glowing ring of metal fell to Earth, and no one has any idea what it is
The large ring weighs nearly half a ton and does not match a returning rocket.
"Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans," the space agency told The New York Times. "It was suggested that the ring is space debris, but the evidence is marginal," wrote Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Like McDowell, Langbroek concluded that the most likely source for the object was an Ariane V launch that took place back in July 2008, in which the European rocket lofted two satellites into geosynchronous transfer orbit.
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