What you think are aurora may actually be a different phenomenon scientists are calling 'Steve'
Krista Trinder/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
- Did you see an aurora?
- Think again.
- It might have been a night sky phenomenon called a "Steve."
Brilliant auroral displays are happening more and more frequently as the sun reaches its 11-year peak in solar activity — but some of the lights you see might not be auroras at all.
They might be "Steve."
In 2018, scientists identified a new type of phenomenon in the night sky that looked like a streak of white and purple light.
They called it "Steve," NASA explained.
NASA thought Steve — a joke name from citizen scientists that was later retconned to mean "Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement" — wasn't the same as an aurora but was probably formed by the same process.
But a new paper is challenging that hypothesis, arguing that the physical process behind Steve and a similar phenomenon dubbed the "picket fence" is nothing like what creates auroras, according to UC Berkeley.
The research was written by Claire Gasque, a UC Berkeley graduate student in physics who worked with researchers at the university's Space Sciences Laboratory.
Gasque's paper argues that there are low-altitude electric fields that exist parallel to the Earth's magnetic field producing Steve and the picket fence, according to UC Berkeley, something that was previously thought to be impossible.
"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," said Brian Harding, a co-author of the paper, according to UC Berkeley.
"Claire's paper showed that parallel electric fields are capable of explaining this exotic spectrum," Harding added.
Gasque and her team have proposed that NASA launch a rocket through auroras and eventually through Steve and the picket fence to see if she is right.
"This would upend our modeling of what creates light and the energy in the aurora in some cases," Gasque said, according to UC Berkeley. "It's one of the biggest mysteries in space physics right now."