A mysterious light was discovered streaking across the Southern California sky on Wednesday. This news had sent the social media into a frenzy.

Residents of southern California all the way to Utah spotted a curious streak of light, and many took to the help of internet to find the answer, and shared their own theories regarding what it could be of.

Varied explanations were given at first after the slow movement of the fireball was spotted across the western U.S. and exploded into several pieces.

But the officials of the National Weather Service out of Salt Lake City has informed that the light was caused by "space junk" in twitter.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that observations from Utah indicated that it was part of a Chinese rocket reentering the atmosphere.

McDowell informed later that multiple agencies had confirmed the light to be of Chang Zheng 7 rocket.

The most popular suppositions were that this was the creation of some kind of extra-terrestrial life, or that it was a meteor.

A NASA spokesperson told that the light was "the re-entry of a Chinese rocket body."

Social media users were nonetheless awestruck at the beauty of this flaming piece of space junk as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere.

By Prakriti Neogi