William Atkins
Saturday, 19 December 2009 21:57
Science -
Space
Page 1 of 3
NASA’s THEMIS spacecraft, high in the sky, and a camera network, on the ground, has recorded an explosive phenomenon that caused the jaws of its scientists to drop. A movie shows spectacular outbursts of light as a result of collisions of the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights.
The 12-17-2009 NASA media brief “
Colliding Auroras Produce Explosions of Light,” reports on the reactions that occurred when the THEMIS team first saw the movie that resulted from the
“spectacular outbursts of light” from the aurora borealis, or the northern polar lights.
U.S. space scientist Larry Lyons, of the University of California (Los Angeles), exclaimed,
"Our jaws dropped when we saw the movies for the first time. These outbursts are telling us something very fundamental about the nature of auroras."
It has been known that sometimes when the lights of the aurora borealis collide they produce
“spectacular outbursts of light.”
However, the spectacle occurs over such vast distances--thousands of miles--that to casual observers on Earth it simply goes unnoticed.
Fortuitously, with the complex network of cameras set up in collaboration with the THEMIS mission, images of the explosive event have been recorded for study and analysis of scientists—and for your viewing pleasure.
THEMIS, short for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions
during Substorms, is a team of five satellites launched by the U.S.
space agency NASA on February 17, 2007, to study energy releases from
the magnetosphere of Earth.
These energy releases bring about the auroras near Earth’s north pole
(aurora borealis, Northern Lights) and south pole (aurora australis,
Southern Lights).
Page two contains information on the movies produced by THEMIS.
