The annual Perseid meteor shower started peaking recently. These showers are named after the constellation Perseus because the direction from which these meteors appear in the sky is located in the same direction as the constellation. This year, up to 100 meteors per hour were expected to be seen in India during the peak.
Against this backdrop, a viral video claiming to show the Perseid meteor shower from India has gone viral on social media.
A Facebook user posted the viral post with a caption:
Agra, India…yesterday’s Perseid 2023 meteor shower.
You can check the post here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the viral post, and found it to be false.
Running a Reverse Image Search of the video keyframes, the NM team traced a news article in The Sun — a British tabloid newspaper, dated April 4, 2022 and titled: SHOOTING STAR Incredible footage of space debris barrage shows ‘rocket’ burning up in night sky.
The video in the article matches exactly with the viral clip. According to the article, the visuals were seen in western India, and they are of space debris, possibly from a Chinese rocket.
Searching further, we identified a tweet by Jonathan McDowell — an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, dated April 2, 2022. McDowell clarifies that the video shows the re-entry of a Chinese rocket stage, the third stage of the Chang Zheng 3B serial number Y77, which was launched in Feb 2021.
Therefore, we can conclusively say that the viral video, claiming to show visuals from the Perseid meteor shower, is false.
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