Mysterious orange fireball lights up Florida sky

A mysterious orange glowing fireball streaked across the sky in Florida overnight.

The American Meteor Society reported two dozen sightings from Jacksonville to Key West after midnight and admitted on Twitter there’s “no real explanation yet”.

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office posted to social media that “we were not invaded last night by Martians, but we appreciate the level of confidence you have of us to stop intergalactic invaders.”

But Jonathan McDowell at the Centre for Astrophysics had a more sensible explanation, suggesting they were just pieces of a Chinese rocket as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere.

He said the centre helped put a Chinese military communication satellite in orbit, and like most space junk, was being tracked as it circled the planet.

Launched in January, the rocket weighed over two tonnes and was roughly nine metres long.

“The stuff is moving slowly. It’s breaking up into multiple pieces. It’s sort of a classic space debris break-up,” he told The Associated Press.

McDowell said re-entries like this are common and happen about once a month, but they don’t often “happen at night over the US where lots of people see it, so that’s what was unusual.”

One member of the public called 911 to say it was the biggest thing he’d ever seen in the sky, telling the operator he was walking out of a donut shop in Lantana when he saw the fireball separate into two parts in a burst of flames and sparkles.