Experts have estimated there is now a one in 20 chance two satellites are going to collide over Pittsburgh on Wednesday night, potentially creating "an amazing show in the sky," CBS News reported.
A space debris tracking company, LeoLabs tweeted its estimations before the potential event, suggesting it might be a near miss.
"These are actual spaceships that could collide in space," Buhl Planetarium and Observatory of the Carnegie Science Center's Ralph Crewe told CBS.
"They're unmanned and they've been not operational for a while."
The two objects range in size from a trash can of about 10 pounds and the size of a small car, traveling toward each other at 10 times that of a bullet shot out of a gun, according to the report.
"It's not guaranteed that it's going to collide, but if it does, any fragments that fall to Earth are going to hit the atmosphere at tremendous speed and burn up, much like a shooting star," Crewe told CBS. "In fact, if you do see anything, it will look sort of like a burst of shooting stars almost."
There is not threat to those in Pittsburgh, though, he stressed.
"Thankfully, it is relatively safe," he told CBS. "Nobody on Earth has any chance of taking any damage from this, so it will just be an amazing show in the sky."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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