The shiny green, red and purple hues of light in the night sky, called northern and southern lights, find their place in the bucket lists of many travel enthusiasts worldwide. But the mauve and white streaks of such light in the sky, called Steve and a glowing green “picket fence” often appear disguised as Auroras.
Let the myth be broken that they are not Auroras. In fact, they are more distinct forms of illuminence in the night sky.
According to Claire Gasque, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student in physics, the appearance of Steve and ‘picket fence’ is totally different from the processes responsible for the well-known auroras.
Gasque has reportedly teamed up with researchers at the campus’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) to propose that NASA launch a rocket into the heart of the aurora to find out if she’s correct.
Whether NASA would launch such rocket, is yet to be seen.
Why Steve and Picket Fence appear?
Steve is an acronym for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.
The appearance of vibrant auroras along with Steve and Picket Fence is now becoming increasingly common. This is because the sun has entered an active period of its 11-year cycle of solar storms and coronal mass ejections.
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Gasque described the physics behind the picket fence in a paper published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Gasque is scheduled to discuss the results on Dec. 14 in talk at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
She calculated that in a region of the upper atmosphere farther south than that in which auroras form, electric fields parallel to Earth’s magnetic field could produce the color spectrum of the picket fence.
“This would upend our modeling of what creates light and the energy in the aurora in some cases,” Gasque said in an official comment.
“The really interesting thing about Claire’s paper is that we’ve known for a couple of years now that the Steve spectrum is telling us there’s some very exotic physics going on. We just didn’t know what it was,” Brian Harding, a co-author of the paper and an SSL assistant research physicist said. “Gasque’s paper showed that parallel electric fields are capable of explaining this exotic spectrum.”
