Last night, many baffled Brits took to Twitter, after spotting UFO-like lights racing through the night sky.
Thankfully, aliens weren’t to blame for the lights, and instead they were satellites from Elon Musk ’s Starlink fleet.
They form a constellation of thousands of satellites, and are designed to provide low-cost broadband internet service from low Earth orbit.
Last night, the satellites were visible for many eagle-eyed viewers across Europe.
Twitter user Arnold van Sebben spotted the satellites from Amsterdam, tweeting: “Just saw, for the first time, a train of @SpaceX #Starlink satellites crosses in orbit above Amsterdam. It was a bit surreal to see them pass by.”
Meanwhile, other Twitter users reported seeing the satellites across the UK, including over Suffolk, the Midlands and Leeds.
If you missed last night’s sighting, thankfully there are several other opportunities to see the satellites in the coming weeks.
According to Find Starlink, the satellites will be visible from the UK again at around 21:58 BST, as well as at 03:30 BST tomorrow morning.
You can find a full list of upcoming sightings from your area here.
Elon Musk hopes the satellites will bring low-cost internet to Earth.
Starlink explained: “With performance that far surpasses that of traditional satellite internet, and a global network unbounded by ground infrastructure limitations, Starlink will deliver high speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable.”
However, several astronomers have raised concerns that one of the satellites could pass in front of a telescope and obscure an image.
In a recent study, published in arXiv, researchers led by Stefano Gallozzi, wrote: "Depending on their altitude and surface reflectivity, their contribution to the sky brightness is not negligible for professional ground based observations.
"With the huge amount of about 50,000 new artificial satellites for telecommunications planned to be launched in Medium and Low Earth Orbit, the mean density of artificial objects will be of >1 satellite for square sky degree; this will inevitably harm professional astronomical images."
