An astronomer said a glowing object flying through the evening sky was just a space rocket.

The scientist had to clarify assumptions after a rounded, glowing figure flew above homes and illuminated the sky in several regions in China on January 14.

Compilation footage shows the bright object visibly triangular in some of the videos and three light sources travelling across the horizon.

But Wang Zhuoxiao, an astronomer from the Centre for Astronomy Technology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said it was most probably a space rocket from Elon Musk's Starlink Mission.

Zhuoxiao's statement followed after a Falcon 9 rocket sent 22 SpaceX satellites into low orbit from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in the US state of California, at 3:59 am earlier that day.

The astronomer emphasised that the rocket's trajectory was inclined at about 53 degrees to the south and that it would have been over northern China at the halfway point, making it visible to the country's residents at sunset.

Once the Starlink satellites were deployed in orbit, the rocket would have released any surplus fuel, Wang said and added that the process could scatter light, forming a cloud around the rocket.

Wang stated that the rocket might have undergone a tumbling motion to eliminate excess fuel, providing a possible explanation for the varied shapes observed in the 'rocket cloud.'

Zhuoxiao's explanation was later confirmed by one of his fellow colleagues at the Beijing Planetarium.