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Liz MacDonald: People were out observing the aurora, and they started noticing something that was overhead
as well, when they were seeing aurora far to the northern regions.
It was unlike most aurora. Talked to the scientists,
we didn't know what it was. And together,
they said we will keep taking observations, and we will call it Steve
in the meantime. Steve is mostly a very narrow purple arc
and sometimes it has these little green features
that go along with it as well that are kind of like waving fingers
or a picket fence. That means that there's plasma physics
happening up there to cause that light and to make these
little discrete features that we don't understand yet.
We now have some satellite observations from the ESA satellite
called SWARM that show that Steve
optically is associated with a very strong flow
in the particles in the ionosphere, the upper level of our atmosphere.
Steve is important for a number of reasons. It's really
exciting that people armed with cameras
all over the globe can capture something that we didn't fully understand
and shed new light on that.
It's also really exciting that this happens further to the south where there are more people.
So, it might be a kind of aurora that more people can see than the usual kind.
We are now able to look up at the sky and see
things about the aurora and this sub-auroral region
that we never understood before.
We can correlate that with our traditional observations and lead to greater
understanding.
Thank you to the citizen scientists around the world who help us explore as one.
Join the search for STEVE at www.aurorasaurus.org
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