A few months back, a new astronomical phenomenon, in the form of a purple streak of light, was discovered. This phenomenon has unofficially been named as Steve, by members of Alberta Aurora Chasers—a group of aurora enthusiasts on Facebook—who were reportedly inspired by a scene in move ‘Over the Hedge’ in which a hedge was given the name Steve to make it seem less scary.
Last year, several breathtaking images of this streak of light were shared on Facebook and many people thought it to be a proton aurora.
Auroras are the flickering light seen in skies over northern and southern poles of Earth. These are caused by streams of charged particles that hit atmosphere of Earth after being channeled down by the Earth’s magnetic field. They produce colorful lights.
According to experts, protons can also collide with gases but the wavelengths produced are not visible to human eyes.
Physicist Eric Donovan from the University of Calgary in Canada says when he saw these pictures he was sure that the phenomenon was not a proton aurora.
According to him, ESA deployed one of its Swarm magnetic field mission satellites to gather more information about the streak of light.
“As the satellite flew straight though Steve, data from the electric field instrument showed very clear changes,” Donovan said in a statement.
The scientific instruments on board the satellite revealed that the temperature of this light 300 km above Earth’s surface was 3,000°C. Moreover, a 25-km-wide ribbon of gas was flowing westwards at about 6 km/s speed compared to a speed of about 10 m/s on either side of the ribbon.
Donovan says this phenomenon is not something very rare, although it has been noticed for the first time by scientists. He thinks it may be a flow of hot gas that moves much more quickly than the air around it.
“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.
“In 1997 we had just one all-sky imager in North America to observe the aurora borealis from the ground,” Donovan said.
“Back then we would be lucky if we got one photograph a night of the aurora taken from the ground that coincides with an observation from a satellite. Now we have many more all-sky imagers and satellite missions like Swarm so we get more than 100 a night,” he added.
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