Bright green laser lines shoot across night sky in Hawaii. What caused them? - Livescience.com

(Image credit: National Observatory of Japan)(opens in new tab)A camera attached to a telescope on Hawaii's tallest peak recently captured footage of a series of eerie, bright green lines that shot across the night sky for just over a second.

Experts say the unexpected light show resulted from a rapid burst of lasers fired toward Earth by a NASA spacecraft.

A video(opens in new tab) of the lasers was captured by the Subaru-Asahi Star Camera — co-owned by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and Japanese news agency Asahi Shimbun — attached to the Subaru telescope on top of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on Hawaii's Big Island.

A time-lapse image of the lasers firing next to one another has drawn online comparisons with "digital rain," or the lines of green computer code that fall vertically down the screen during the Matrix movies.

But instead of being a glitch in a simulated reality, the lasers were actually emitted by a device onboard NASA's ICESat-2 satellite, NAOJ representatives wrote on Twitter(opens in new tab).

On Jan. 18 an eerily perfect "whirlpool" of light in the shape of a spiral galaxy briefly appeared above Mauna Kea.