What is the secret of the “unidentified object” that recently fell in Australia? | sciences

The recent discovery by a group of workers in the Western Australian desert of a partially burned UFO has raised concerns among space experts about space waste orbiting the Earth as a result of the remains of launch rockets and decommissioned satellites.

This waste can fall to the surface of the Earth at any moment and pose a real threat, especially if it falls inside populated areas.

The story of the discovery of this unknown object in the Australian desert was exciting. On October 18, 2025, miners found a black object about 1.5 meters in diameter, and weighing approximately 300 kilograms, about 30 kilometers from the small town of Newman.

According to media reports, the unknown object was still warm and smoking in a scene resembling a science fiction movie, but it was very real.

A discovery that worries experts

From the beginning, local police were quick to rule out the plane crash hypothesis, as the object did not match anything known on Earth. Its texture, composed of a mixture of burnt alloys and carbon fibres, indicates a celestial origin, which necessitated calling in experts from the Australian Space Agency for assistance, which in turn ruled out the hypothesis that the body was a piece of meteorite that came from space and penetrated the Earth’s atmosphere.

Although they suggested that the piece was the remains of one of the rockets used to launch satellites, they had difficulty determining its source, which required seeking help from space explorers to solve the mystery.

According to the scientific website “Live Science”, two space debris trackers, Marco Langbroek, an expert in space engineering at Delft University of Technology, and Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, reached the same conclusion, which is that this piece likely came from the upper floor of the Chinese Jilong 3 rocket.

This missile was launched last September and deployed 12 satellites in low Earth orbit. It left its orbit just before it was discovered and fell randomly in the Australian desert.

A sky saturated with debris

According to experts, this incident shows a growing problem as the space surrounding our planet turns into an invisible graveyard of waste.

Hisham Ben Yahia, Vice President of the Tunisian Society for Astronomy, said – in an interview with Al Jazeera Net – that “the remains of old rockets or satellites that have expired have become a major problem in space. We are talking about space pollution as a result of this waste.”

At altitudes of less than two thousand kilometers, thousands of active satellites are currently orbiting, but they share this crowded space with more than 40,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10 centimeters resulting from the fragmentation of components of rocket platforms and disabled satellites.

NASA estimates the number of particles between 1 and 10 centimeters in diameter at about 500,000. The number of particles with a diameter of more than 1 mm exceeds 100 million, while the amount of material orbiting the Earth exceeds 9 thousand tons.

All of these pieces rotate at speeds that may sometimes exceed 25,000 kilometers per hour, turning low Earth orbit into a minefield, according to an article published by Alice Gorman, associate professor of archeology and space studies at Flinders University in Australia, on the “The Conversation” website.

Bin Yahya adds, “These fragments are usually known and can be tracked by radar devices. However, this object that was recently found in Australia was able to penetrate the atmosphere and fall to the surface of the Earth without anyone noticing it, and this is what is worrying about the matter.”

Normally, most of this debris burns up as it reenters the atmosphere, lighting up the sky with stunning light trails. But when the piece is very large or of high density, such as the one found in Australia, the size of the falling fragments remains large as well.

Increasing frequency of fall accidents

In January 2025, a 2.5-metre-diameter metal ring crashed in a Kenyan village. A few months ago, fragments of a battery that fell from the International Space Station penetrated the roof of a house in Florida.

So far, we have been lucky with no human casualties, but the statistics are getting bleaker. A study published in the journal Nature Astronomy in 2022 estimates the probability of death due to falling space debris at 10% over the next decade.

According to Gorman, the Southern Hemisphere, especially Africa, South America, and Australia, is usually more at risk from falling these fragments, because it is often located directly under the paths of re-entry into the atmosphere.

Responsibility remains ambiguous

Legally, it states Outer Space Convention of 1966 stipulates that the country that authorized the launch of a space object remains responsible for its repercussions.

Ben Yahia says, “Space law specifies the responsibility of countries that launch satellites and missiles into space. In this case, space law holds China responsible for the fall of this object.”

But are these laws enough? What worries researchers is not the issue of blaming countries that drop parts of their missiles and satellites on the Earth, but rather the issue of increasing dangers in the future, as launch operations are increasing dramatically.

There are more than 10,000 active satellites in orbit today, and by 2030, this number may reach 70,000. This is at a time when orbit cleaning technologies are advancing slowly, and the pace of launching rockets and commercial satellites into space is accelerating.

The need to clean the orbit

Gorman says end-of-life planning for all spacecraft is critical to managing space debris in low Earth orbit in the future, as there is currently no capacity to efficiently remove debris from that area.

Some agencies are already working on solutions, including using sails to deorbit spacecraft and lasers to break up small debris. The European Space Agency is now promoting a “Zero Debris Charter”, which obliges signatories to stop producing new debris from 2030 onwards.

Other agencies are focusing on “passivation,” a procedure that empties tanks and batteries at the end of a mission to prevent explosions in orbit.

But these efforts are still small compared to the scale of the problem, as every commercial launch adds a drop to the torrent of metallic objects in already saturated orbits.