Many residents of the Bay Area and beyond, even as far east as Reno, reported seeing a meteor-like fireball in the sky that broke apart just before 8 pm Thursday.

The streaks of light in the sky were seen around 7:45 pm, as KTVU reports, with the station reporting that they received messages from viewers all around the Bay.

Paul Lynam, an astronomer with the James Lick Observatory of Mount Hamilton, describes the sight to KTVU as "a long fire debris trail that broke into three, traveling east."

But that was no meteor. Astronomers will tell you that meteors move faster and burn brighter than this thing did.

No, that was no naturally occurring space object. As SFGate reports via the American Meteor Society, what people were seeing was the reentry of a Starlink satellite. Apparently, some disposable Starlink debris was forecast to be reentering Earth's atmosphere on Thursday evening.

There's no word on whether any of the space trash survived reentry and made it down to the ground.

As of 2024 there were around 10,000 active satellites in Earth's orbit, with about 6,600 of those belonging to Elon Musk's SpaceX, under the Starlink banner.

As Discover Magazine explains, satellites have finite lifespans, and many get decommissioned in this way, typically burning up harmlessly in the atmospher on reentry. Still, some of their largest and hardest components, like fuel tanks, can survive reentry and come crashing down to Earth. Around 160 large objects like this do crash down every year, and organizations including the European Space Agency — which produces an annual report about these reentries — track the debris to make certain it does not pose a likely threat to human life.

Most of these objects land in remote areas or in the ocean, but obviously no one wants a piece of Elon Musk's SpaceX trash landing on their house.

Just today, SpaceX sent 24 more Starlink satellites into orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket.