On March 17, 2015, hundreds of miles above New Zealand, a red-blooded light flashed across the sky. For the next half hour, an amateur astronaut observer saw the broadcast unfold in one of the world’s most mysterious atmospheric mysteries – the stark line of light known as the STEVE – recently released images.
STEVE, abbreviated as “strong hot speed,” is a rare air conditioner that first became available in 2018 after amateur aurora hunters spotted a small stream of purple light in the northern sky of Canada. Scientists who quickly studied the phenomenon confirmed that STEVE is not an aurora — a colorful light produced by the formation of solar particles at high altitudes on Earth’s atmosphere. Instead, STEVE was a unique and unique “completely unknown” science.
Unlike northern lights, which glow like broad lines of light green, blue, or red depending on their height, STEVE is often seen as a single line of purplish-white light floating hundreds of miles. Sometimes this is accompanied by a broken green streak, called a “broken fence.”
In a new study, the authors compared the March 2015 images of New Zealand skywatchers with simultaneous satellite imagery and data from a blue photography photographer at the nearby Mount John Observatory of the University of Canterbury. Combining these three sources gave researchers a complete overview of STEVE’s unexpected appearance that night.
The sky marks the beginning of an evening with the emergence of a red SAR as blood rises at least 185 miles (300 km) over Dunedin, New Zealand. Satellite data showed that the appearance of the arc coincided with a powerful geomagnetic storm that lasted about half an hour as the charged solar particles rained in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
As the storm subsided, the red bow gradually released the STEVE mave line, splitting the sky in two at almost the same point. Before the STEVE faded, a green fence glowed to make it visible. According to researchers, this is the first recorded incident of a three-dimensional sphere in the sky – which may reveal new trends in STEVE’s evolution and evolution.
“These phenomena are different from auroras in that their light signals appear to be caused by more thermal and kinetic energy in Earth’s atmosphere, rather than by the production of powerful particles in our atmosphere,” the researchers wrote in a new study.