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When the Sun roars, the earth’s sky lights up with beautiful dancing lights.
On the pillars, iridescent streams of gold dance and twinkle across the sky. Near the equator, a different empyrean glow appears: the red, pink STEVE, with its green barrier.
What these lights are, and why they appear in our sky, is a mystery. Scientists initially thought that, since they resembled auroras, they might be related, but the mechanisms behind the phenomenon remained unclear.
Now, a new paper presents a radical idea: STEVE and the picket fence are not auroras, but something else.
Instead of being produced by magnetic fields like auroras, says a team led by physicist Claire Gasque of the University of California Berkeley, STEVE and the picket fence are produced by electrical fields similar to magnetic lines, at low latitudes instead of the aurora.
If this is the case, it has profound implications for our understanding of the Earth’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, their interaction, and its physics.
“We’ve known for a few years now that the STEVE spectrum is telling us that there are some really weird physics going on. says physician Brian Harding of UC Berkeley. “Claire’s paper showed that parallel electric lines could explain this spectrum.”
Auroras are, indeed, one of the most beautiful sights in the world. They also have a very interesting physical information. It happens when parts of the Sun are thrown out into space, or when they are forced out in a big explosion like a flame, in space.
When they hit the Earth’s magnetosphere, most of them bounce off, but some are captured, and accelerated along magnetic lines at high latitudes, where they are thrown down into the atmosphere. . There, they collide with atmospheric atoms and molecules, exciting them for a while and causing them to glow.
This is the aurora, and its colors range from green to yellow to pink to red to purple, depending on the composition of the atoms. Oxygen green. Purple or blue is nitrogen. Red blood is one of the rare manifestations of oxygen, but it is very high in the air and only occurs when the sun is at its strongest.
Then there’s STEVE, in weird green-and-white colors, sometimes accompanied by a bright green called a picket fence. STEVE – Strong Wind Correcting the heat – sun officially recognized It’s like a different situation in 2018, and scientists have been trying to figure it out for years.
“That’s great,” Gasque said. “This is one of the biggest mysteries in space physics right now.”
Scientists thought that STEVE may have been created by a flow of ionized atoms in the atmosphere by rain as auroral particles, known as subauroral ion drift or. FAITH. The picket fence was thought to be the result of parts falling off a STEVE.
But scientists aren’t sure how a SAID – which is usually not associated with a STEVE – could produce a STEVE-y glow. And Gasque and his team thought there might be another explanation for the picket fence.
“If you look at the spectrum of the picket fence, it’s much greener than you’d expect. And there’s no blue coming from the ionization of nitrogen,” he said.
“What this tells us is that only a strong particle of electricity can create those colors, and it cannot come from space down in the air, because those particles have too much strength.”
Instead, Gasque and his team now show that parts of the picket fence are stimulated locally by an electric current, instead of falling from a higher level to a lower one – a method that very different than the background aurora.
And STEVE, their paper suggests, can be produced in a similar fashion.
There is a good way to find out. Researchers think we need to fire a rocket at STEVE or the picket fence to find out exactly. It can be tricky, since such phenomena are rare, but the first hope is that the aurora can be enhanced – the more intense areas of light that appear from being in an aurora. Their colors match the colors of the picket fence.
These are the characteristics of also thought to be generated by electricity. And, since the aurora are more common than STEVE, they offer a much easier opportunity.
“It’s fair to say that there will be a lot of research in the future about how those electric currents got there, what waves there are or aren’t, and how much energy is transferred to between the earth and the universe. ,” Harding said. “We really don’t know. Claire’s paper is the first step in unlocking that knowledge.”
The study is published in Physical examination book.