Amateur Photographers Have Discovered a New Form of the Northern Lights [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI JANUARY 28, 2020



The auroral dunes appear as a green-tinged and even pattern of waves resembling a striped veil of clouds or dunes on a sandy beach. Credit: Kari Saari

Working together with space researchers, Finnish amateur photographers have discovered a new auroral form. Named ‘dunes’ by the hobbyists, the phenomenon is believed to be caused by waves of oxygen atoms glowing due to a stream of particles released from the Sun.

In the recently published study, the origins of the dunes were tracked to a wave guide formed within the mesosphere and its boundary, the mesopause. The study also posits that this new auroral form provides researchers with a novel way to investigate conditions in the upper atmosphere.

The study was published in the first issue of the high-impact journal AGU Advances.

An unknown fingerprint appears in the sky
Minna Palmroth, Professor of Computational Space Physics at the University of Helsinki, heads a research group developing the world’s most accurate simulation of the near-Earth space and space weather that cause auroral emissions.

The sun releases a steady flow of charged particles, known as the solar wind. Reaching the Earth’s ionized upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, they create auroral emissions by exciting atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The excitation state is released as auroral light.

More:
https://scitechdaily.com/amateur-photographers-have-discovered-a-new-form-of-the-northern-lights/