Glowing red arcs invisible to the naked eye have been spotted high above Europe.
The mysterious phenomenon has never been captured before, and are remnants of the magnetic storms that batter the Earth.
An Italian telescope was able to capture them for the first time high up in the ionosphere, which stretches from about 50 to 370 miles (85 to 600 kilometers) above the Earth.
MAGNETIC STORMS
When streams of high-energy, charged particles come rushing from the sun to batter Earth, they cause what are called geomagnetic storms.
These events are disruptions in the magnetosphere, the part of Earth’s atmosphere dominated by the planet’s magnetic field, and cause giant, bright auroras in Earth’s polar regions.
An international team of scientists watched the sky with the observatory during a geomagnetic storm that struck Earth in 2011.
Using a new All-Sky Imaging Air-Glow Observatory (ASIAGO), located in northern Italy, researchers set up cameras with highly sensitive sensors and a fish-eye lens in a bid to to observe the elusive arcs.
The arcs give off a very specific wavelength of red light, but are too faint to see with the naked eye.
After comparing their observations with satellite- and ground-based observations, the researchers found that red arcs could reach all the way down to Europe, stretching from Ireland in the west to Belarus in the east.
Red arcs happen when oxygen atoms in the ionosphere emit light, after being excited by electrons heated at greater heights in Earth’s magnetosphere
The Northern Lights, also known as Aurora Borealis at moonset near Inari, Lapland, Finland. Researchers have now captured another effect of magnetic storms, a red arc
The fact that scientists can now see these arcs over Europe means that, in combination with similar data from the Americas and the Pacific Ocean, researchers can now see how long the arcs stretch across vast distances over the planet ‘and thus how long it takes the magnetosphere to be drained of its storm-time energy,’ researcher Michael Mendillo, a space physicist at Boston University, told OurAmazingPlanet.
The arcs appear at lower latitudes, unlike auroras, which typically occur over higher latitudes.
Source: dailymail
