Northern white white lights represent new auroral mystery

Mysterious white gray strips are observed woven through the northern lights.

New images reveal that these ghost glitter can appear stuck inside or bent near the red and green aurora. But pale lights are not Aurora itself, researchers reported on December 30th at The communications of nature. On the contrary, they can arise through a process similar to what relies on the light of the Mauve light known as Steve.

“These observations remind us of how much we still have to learn about the basic processes that form aurora,” says Claire Gasque, a space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley is not involved in work.

Researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada initially noticed something strange in the auroral photographs taken from the Explorer transition region, or the threex mission. This Canada -based low -light camera network and other equipment is dedicated to feeling the space of the space near the Earth. While other auroral images collect only certain wavelengths of red or green light, the Trex cameras capture full color images.

One day in 2023, Emma Spanswick’s space physicist was considering some of these photos with a colleague. “We see this really, really weird. It was this kind of gray, white piece,” she says. “We were both like,” what IS that? ‘”

After looking at the raids similar to the gray white in other images, the team decided to do a comprehensive search of past threex data. They found 30 white auroras over Rabbit Lake and Lucky Lake in Saskatchewan from 2019 to 2023.

Images with all points showed that these white tents can include tens in hundreds of kilometers. They sometimes appeared alongside red or green auroras. Other times, the white light flourished in places where the colorful Auroras had just faded.

Spectral data confirmed that white light is made up of continuous emission. “When you see a continuous emission, you have little light in all wavelengths,” says Spanswick. This is different from normal auroras, where particles raining in atoms of the atmosphere to throw only specific red or green wavelengths.

The continuous emission of northern white lights looks very much like that of Steve, short for strong improvement of thermal emission speed. Steve is a purple white bunch that goes east to the west beyond the sky, closer to the equator than the typical Aurora. It is thought to arise from a river of extremely fast plasma that rushes through the atmosphere, warming the particles to the shine.

The newly identified white vortex between the northern lights can also arise from atmospheric heating. “But what are you doing the heat? And why in this patch, not the region next to it? “Says Spanswick.” We have no ideas. “

While someone studying Steve, Gasque says that “similar emissions in Aurora are interesting.” The patchiness of the northern white lights, compared to the skilled arch of Steve, suggests that both phenomena are not quite the same, she says. But there may be similar chemistry after the two, which can help solve a long mystery for Steve.

Namely, it is not yet clear how the plasma stream changes atmospheric chemistry to create the light of Steve. By investigating similar emissions that intercept between Aurora, Gasque says, “can provide valuable data.”