Kicker: Rocket jellyfish

NICK EICHER, HOST: Recently a Japanese telescope recorded a bright shape in the night sky. The time-lapse video posted to YouTube shows a small white sphere that widens into a very clear, blue spiral.

CONTACT: …I must have gone through a wormhole…

Sorry to say, it’s not a wormhole.

But it is quite an interesting phenomenon. How it works is the sun lights up gasses that come from the rockets during launch at twilight. That’s when observers on earth are able to see the light display, in darkness below.

Typically these formations look like comet tails or often just blobs of gas that seem to hang in place—and that’s why people are calling these things rocket jellyfish.

What’s different this time is the Space X Falcon 9 must be twisting while venting the gas, creating the spiral shape.

REICHARD: I looked it up. It’s amazing!

EICHER: Given that Elon Musk’s behind this, I would’ve guessed he’d have fashioned the blue spiral into a Twitter logo.

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