They identify “polar rain aurora,” a phenomenon never documented on land.

A new paper confirms that scientists saw an aurora in 2022 – an extremely rare phenomenon.

The Northern Lights are a phenomenon that has no problem captivating our eyes. They are a reminder of how dazzling and beautiful nature is. And, moreover, these are not entirely unusual events, since there are places on Earth that are accustomed to seeing them. But, if we talk about the “aurora rain lights”, everything changes on the last point.

It turns out that in 2022, almost like a Christmas present, a huge aurora lit up the sky for thousands of kilometers around the North Pole, in the last hours of December 25th and the first hours of the 26th.

“This aurora had a very soft shape, and its structure was a blurry greenish spot. “It looked like a big greenish pie,” explains Keisuke Hosokawa, a space physicist at the University of Electrocommunications in Tokyo, Japan.

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Probably, leaving aside the expert’s assessments, you are wondering what is so special about this glow, which, although it has the potential to surprise, is not far from what we imagine during these atmospheric phenomena. But there is something that sets him apart from the majority. We tell you.

polar rain, polar lights

Let’s first discuss what the Northern Lights are. These are atmospheric phenomena that appear in natural light in the sky and are formed when charged particles flying from the Sun collide and interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. So what’s going on with the aurora rain lights?

The aurora observed at the end of 2022 is classified as “polar rain”. Unlike others, it is formed when electrons moving directly from the solar corona or outer atmosphere collide with the Earth’s atmosphere rather than the magnetic field.

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According to information provided by the trade journal Nature, polar rain auroras are rare because there are rarely enough of these electrons colliding with the atmosphere to create the glow. In addition, other types of charged particles interfere with the formation of these auroras.

At the time, although the scientists who discovered the event saw something special, they weren’t sure what it was. After analyzing the nature of the event, they discovered that it was a polar rain aurora, and report this in an article in the journal Science Advances.

“What’s really interesting about this paper is that it shows that there are still fundamental discoveries to be made,” said Larry Paxton, co-author and astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in the US.

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