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posted by martyb on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the Strong-Thermal-Emission-Velocity-Enhancement dept.

http://www.sciencealert.com/introducing-steve-a-newly-discovered-light-in-the-sky

Introducing Steve - a Newly Discovered Astronomical Phenomenon.

[...] You might be familiar with the more 'normal' kinds of auroras, which are the flickering curtains of light in the skies above our planet's poles, caused by streams of charged particles channelled down by the Earth's magnetic field, where they bash into the atmosphere.

As electrons hit the different gases, we can see them emit different colours of light, producing what are colloquially called the Southern and Northern lights.

Protons can hit the gases as well, but while the electrons they bump loose can cause light to spill down, the wavelengths emitted by the proton collisions themselves aren't visible.

Physicist Eric Donovan from the University of Calgary in Canada understood this subtle difference, so wasn't convinced the pictures were of proton auroras. Steve had to be something else.

Combining information on the times and locations of Steve with data gathered by the ESA's Swarm magnetic field mission, Donovan began to piece together some of the phenomenon's unusual characteristics.

"As the satellite flew straight though Steve, data from the electric field instrument showed very clear changes," Donovan said.

"The temperature 300 kilometres (185 miles) above Earth's surface jumped by 3,000°C (5,400 degrees Fahrenheit) and the data revealed a 25 kilometre (15.5 mile) wide ribbon of gas flowing westwards at about 6 km/s (3.7 miles per second) compared to a speed of about 10 m/s (32.8 feet per second) either side of the ribbon."

Donovan told Gizmodo's George Dvorsky that while they have some idea about what might be causing the immense spike in temperature inside Steve, he and his colleagues are keeping the details under their hat until they publish.

[...] "It turns out that Steve is actually remarkably common, but we hadn't noticed it before. It's thanks to ground-based observations, satellites, today's explosion of access to data and an army of citizen scientists joining forces to document it," says Donovan.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:16AM (#499176)

    Lady Gaia