Many Australians witnessed a spectacular light show that wasn't what many of them first thought it was.

Locals, especially in Melbourne, flocked to social media and radio stations saying a blazing meteor put on an amazing display of fiery light. Some witnesses even described the phenomenon as a fantastic explosion that showered the ground with blazing rocks.

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One witness saw the meteor as "a really long, white tail with flecks of red." Many speculated this could be an asteroid or a comet.

According to a leading astronomer, however, the "meteor" that traced a glowing streak along southeastern Australia that night was actually space junk.

More specifically, the junk belonged to a Russian Soyuz rocket  that launched a Russian Meteor-M weather satellite last July 8.

NASA issued an alert last Thursday that debris from the Soyuz would enter the atmosphere. It described the debris as a seven-meter long, three-ton cylindrical object that could impact in either Victoria or Tasmania.

According to Brian Schmidt, an astronomer at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, these objects were monitored closely.

He also confirmed that this object was travelling at a slow rate following a grazing trajectory.This phenomenon is something to be expected from objects re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.

The bulk of the space junk most likely plunged into the sea near Brisbane said Nick Lomb, a curator of astronomy at the Sydney Observatory. He also indicated that this object was indeed space junk because it was travelling at a relatively slower rate than the escape velocity from Earth's atmosphere which is 40,000 km/hr.

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