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The ethereal dark-green glow of the northern lights is a well-understood phenomenon, but that doesn't make information technology any less lovely. A unlike atmospheric low-cal bear witness is even so puzzling scientists. Information technology is currently known as the Stiff Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement or STEVE for short. Amateur photographers take defenseless hints of STEVE for years, just scientists only recently started examining the outcome. The only thing we tin can be sure of at this point is that STEVE is much more majestic than its name.

The northern lights (too known every bit the aurora borealis) is the result of the solar wind hit the magnetosphere and producing showers of light. Auroras aren't bars to the northern latitudes — you'll observe them nigh the south pole also. They can cover big swaths of the globe when solar activity is at its maximum, but STEVE is dissimilar. Information technology'southward smaller and very much not an aurora. Yes, the NASA video below calls information technology an aurora, just it's a few months old. Sometimes scientific discipline moves fast.

STEVE is a narrow, purplish band of color that tends to occur alongside the northern lights. Information technology can stretch more than than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) across the sky. Unlike the northern lights, STEVE merely appears several times each year, which has fabricated it difficult to study. That led many scientists to assume that STEVE was but role of the aurora procedure we already knew about until only recently.

A new analysis from the University of Calgary and the University of California calls the traditional wisdom into question. NOAA's Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite 17 (POES-17) circles the globe 14 times per day, and it happened that its path took it directly over top of a STEVE upshot recently. POES-17 has an instrument that can measure charged particles in the atmosphere, but it plant none of them associated with STEVE. Additional observations from ground-based cameras confirm the data.

The report doesn't go into detail on what STEVE is, but it seems information technology's not an aurora of any sort. The researchers are currently calling this miracle a "sky glow." Simply because we don't know what STEVE is doesn't mean there aren't apparent hypotheses. Scientists using data from POES-17 believe STEVE originates in the ionosphere. This instrument detects no charged particles, just streams of fast ions or hot electrons could be responsible for STEVE'southward light emissions.

Researchers will probably work out the mechanism that produces STEVE at present that it's striking the scientific mainstream. And then, just sit back, relax, and enjoy the mystery while you tin can.

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