Dec 10, 2009: Norwegian Pinwheel

[xoxoxoBruce]

Neatorama pointed to the MailOnline story of weird happenings in the Norwegian night sky.

The mystery began when a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain in the north of the country. It stopped mid-air, then began to move in circles. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre - lasting for ten to 12 minutes before disappearing completely.

Onlookers describing it as 'like a big fireball that went around, with a great light around it' and 'a shooting star that spun around and around'.

And it wasn't seen by just some drunk on his way home from the bar, lots of people saw, and photographed, it.



So what was it?

Celebrity astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard said he had never seen anything like the lights. He said: 'My first thought was that it was a fireball meteor, but it has lasted far too long. 'It may have been a missile in Russia, but I can not guarantee that it is the answer.'

Air traffic control in Tromsō claimed the light show lasted 'far too long to be an astronomical phenomenon'.

It even made youtube



The pros weigh in;

Norwegian defence spokesman Jon Espen Lien also said the lights were probably from a Russian missile test claiming it was normal for Russia to use the White Sea and the Barents Sea as a testing ground.
Tromsō Geophysical Observatory researcher Truls Lynne Hansen agreed, saying the missile had likely veered out of control and exploded, and the spiral was light reflecting on the leaking fuel.

But the mystery deepened last night as Russia denied it had been conducting missile tests in the area. A Moscow news outlet quoted the Russian Navy as denying any rocket launches from the White Sea area. Norway should be informed of such launches under international agreements, it was stressed.

The Russian Defence Ministry was unavailable for comment.

Is "unavailable" a euphemism for on their way to the gulag?

Pie sent me this Discover link.

However, after a moment, I realized this must be a rocket, most likely spiraling out of control. I don’t understand all the details — I don’t have all the info yet — but a rocket fits what we’re seeing here. First, this was seen all over Norway, so it must have been at a high altitude to be so visible. Second, the blue spiral angling down to the right is clearly due to perspective. A rocket spiraling around, and coming up from the lower right, would appear to make tight spirals when it was far away and bigger ones as it got closer.

Third, you can actually see the bright white spiral spinning in the videos. That threw me for a second, to be honest, but after a moment I figured that it makes sense if the rocket is headed more or less straight toward the camera. Whatever it is being lit up (exhaust, or a leaking payload?) would appear to expand in a spiral like water from a spinning sprinklerhead. The spiral itself is not spinning any more than water from the sprinkler is; that’s an illusion of motion.

Fourth, after a few moments, a black disk appears to expand in the center of the white spiral, as seen in this picture (it’s a little fuzzy; you can see the person taking it must have used a long exposure because foreground lights are jittery, but you get the idea). That’s exactly what I would expect if whatever is being ejected by the rocket ran out; the arms of the spiral would expand away from the center, leaving black emptiness in the middle.

So that’s my hypothesis. A rocket got out of control, perhaps losing a stabilizer, and started to spiral. The two spirals, different in shape, size, and color, indicate something happened in the middle of all this (the rocket second stage fired while still spinning, or something else started leaking out), changing the rocket’s direction. Then, when the fuel or whatever ran out, the white spiral began to disappear from the inside out as the material expanded in space.

So that's why they're off to see the gulag.

[ZenGum]

New Scientist says it was a Russian rocket. (Russian around in circles....)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...l-missile.html

... says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and author of Jonathan's Space Report, a fortnightly email newsletter about space launches. "It's definitely a missile launch failure," he told New Scientist.

He says it was most likely a failed test of Russia's submarine-launched Bulava ballistic missile, which is intended to be able to evade missile-defence systems.

"We know that the Russian Navy submarine Dmitry Donskoy is in the White Sea and was preparing for the 12th test launch of the Bulava missile, which has had numerous failures," he says.

Of the missile's 11 previous launches since 2005, six have been failures, a track record that might explain why Russia has reportedly denied a Wednesday launch, McDowell says: "This could be because another Bulava failure is a huge and embarrassing setback for their programme."

[SPUCK]

What a bunch of BS! We all know that was a Klingon Phaser attack! It probably took out a Russian sub and they're all covering their butts.

[monster]

can we please take this one as goatsed? I'm all out of photoshop time.... kthxbai

[monster]

(Looks like a lollipop to me...)

[Sheldonrs]

Anybody remember the old TV show "Time Tunnel"?
That's what it reminds me of.

Or for you younger crowd, the time machine from the "Austin Powers movies.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Sheldonrs

Or for you younger crowd, the time machine from the "Austin Powers movies.

That's before my time.

[Degrees]

I say it was space aliens, conducting an intelligence test. IF weird-stuff-happens-in-the-sky WHEN your-scientists-push-the-large-hadron-collider-past-the-safe-zone THEN keep-going = idiots ELSE making-damn-sure-the-LHC-didn't-cause-a-rift-in-space = not idiots.

[TheMercenary]

It may be hard to evade defense systems with that giant spotlight coming from it. The Ruskies may need to rethink that system.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by SPUCK

What a bunch of BS! We all know that was a Klingon Phaser attack! It probably took out a Russian sub and they're all covering their butts.

Klingons use disrupters, not phasers. Everybody knows that.

[Gravdigr]

I can't really take this seriously. I mean, everything I've seen just looks so, I don't know, comicbook-ish.

[Cicero]

Merc's right, the spotlight is a dead give-away. It still looks neat....I'm easily amused.

[SPUCK]

Well the Ruskies admitted it finally.. Shucks.

[Pie]

Originally Posted by /.

"According to this article over at BarentsObserver, the giant spiral seen on the sky over Norway Wednesday morning local time has been confirmed to be the result of a failed Russian missile launch. Russia now confirms that '...the missile was launched from submerged position in the White Sea by the nuclear submarine Dmitri Donskoy. Studies of the telemetric data from the launch show that the two first stages of the missile functioned as they should, and that a technical malfunctioning occurred during the third stage.' There is also an article on this at The Daily Mail."

[xoxoxoBruce]

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, to the gulag they will go...