It has actually been more than a week because reports initially emerged about a “glowing ring of metal” that fell from the sky and crashed near a remote town in Kenya.

According to the Kenya Space Agency, the things weighed 1,100 pounds (500 kg) and had a size of more than 8 feet (2.4 meters) when determined after it arrived at December 30. A number of days later on, the area firm with confidence reported that the things was a piece of area particles, stating it was a ring that separated from a rocket. “Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” the area company informed The New York Times.

Because those preliminary reports were released in Western media, a little band of devoted area trackers have actually been utilizing open source information to attempt to recognize exactly which area things fell under Kenya. Far, they have actually not been able to determine the rocket launch to which the big ring can be associated.

Now, some area trackers think the item might not have actually originated from area at all.

Did it truly originate from area?

Area is progressively crowded, however big portions of metal from rockets are usually not flying around in Earth orbit unnoticed and untracked.

“It was suggested that the ring is space debris, but the evidence is marginal,” composed Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist operating at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell is extremely related to for his analysis of area things. “The most likely space-related possibility is the reentry of the SYLDA adapter from the Ariane V184 flight, object 33155. Nevertheless, I am not fully convinced that the ring is space debris at all,” he composed.

Another popular area tracker, Marco Langbroek, thinks it’s possible that the ring originated from area, so he examined even more into things that might have returned around the time of the item’s discovery in Kenya. In an article composed Wednesday he kept in mind that apart from the metal ring, other pieces looking constant with area particles– consisting of product that appears like carbon wrap and seclusion foil– were discovered a number of kilometers far from the ring.