Cameras caught a space jellyfish fly over Georgia In the wee morning hours of Thursday(May 5), a camera in Waycross, Georgia witnessed a mysterious object streaking through the sky. Bright, fast and trailed by a glowing oblong aura, the object looked a bit like a space jellyfish, as Chris Combs, a professor of aerodynamics and mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio put it on twitter (https://bit.ly/3FrcNVC). Of course, as Combs pointed out, this space jelly was no UFO - it was a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Florida's Kennedy Space Center (https://bit.ly/3vXECBV), roughly 250 miles (400 kilometers) south of the camera. Dozens of rockets leave the launchpad at Kennedy every year, but few of them could rightly be mistaken for a bioluminescent invertebrate in the sky. So, what happened here? According to Combs, it's a combination of physics and perfect timing. For starters, the long, blobby "body" of the jellyfish is simply exhaust leaving the Falcon 9's rocket engine nozzle, Combs wrote. The reason the exhaust takes on such a bulbous shape has to do with the pressure difference inside and outside the nozzle. In this case, the exhaust leaving the nozzle is "under-expanded" - meaning the gas is at higher pressure than the ambient air around it as the exhaust leaves the engine's nozzle.