On December 30, a mysterious 1,100-pound object in the shape of a massive, 8-f00t metal ring was discovered in a remote Kenyan village, prompting widespread speculation it had fallen from space.As the New York Times reported"Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earths atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans," the agency said in a statement.But now, space tracker extraordinaire and Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell is casting doubt on the theory."It was suggested that the ring is space debris, but the evidence is marginal," he wrote in a blog on his personal website, first spotted by Ars Technica.The uncertainty highlights how difficult it can be to trace back space debris that survives its fiery descent through the Earth's atmosphere a pertinent topic given our planet's increasingly cluttered orbit, and that junk's increasing propensity to fall down to Earth.If it indeed came from space, McDowell suggested that the most likely culprit was a fairing adapter for an Ariane V rocket, which launched into space from the European Space Agency's Spaceport in French Guiana on 7 July 2008."Nevertheless I am not fully convinced that the ring is space debris at all," he added.A different space tracker, Delft Technical University lecturer Marco Langbroek, suggested that nearby material recovered several kilometers away from the metal ring, which resembled carbon wrap and isolation foil, could be evidence that the ring may have indeed fallen from space.Both Langbroek and McDowell pointed towards the possibility that the ring was installed on the Ariane V rocket to accommodate two medium-sized satellites. The SYstme de Lancement Double Ariane, or SYLDA, was designed to allow the two satellites to be stacked on top of each other and released in a geostationary transfer orbit.The primary space junk suspect was last spotted on December 23, a week before the metal ring was recovered in Kenya, as Langbroek notes in a Wednesday blog post."As this is a very low inclination orbit (1.56 degrees), it belongs to a class of objects that is ill-tracked due to a lack of tracking stations close to the equator," he wrote. "This explains the 1-week gap between the last available orbit and the reentry.""For now the verdict is: possibly the reentry of parts of the Ariane SYLDA 2008-034C, but not proven beyond doubt yet," he added.Intriguingly, as Ars reports, an anonymous Twitter account called DutchSpace, which has provided reliable information on past Ariane launches, disputed the possibility that the ring was part of the SYLDA shell.Arianespace officials also rejected the hypothesis in a statement to the French newspaper LeParisien this week.In short, the jury is still out on whether the metal ring actually came from space, but it certainly wouldn't be an outlier if it did. We've already seen a number of massive pieces of space debris dropping down on remote areas; Chinese rocket launches, in particular, have gained a reputation for raining down metal debris on unsuspectingand sometimespopulated areas.More on space junk: Boeing Satellite Exploded Into at Least 500 Pieces of DebrisShare This Article