On October 8, a French astronaut, Thomas Pesquet, captured something quite peculiar, almost otherworldly, about the International Space Station: a long-time photo shows something bright blue flashing over Europe, like a huge nuclear bomb would have exploded on the old continent. Most people on Earth, however, did not notice anything special at the time in question. What could be the huge flash?
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The more spectacular flashes in the upper atmosphere have long been the focus of interest for astronomers and astronauts, and they tend to endeavor to give them exotic names. These include blue beams, red nightmares, and ring nightmares.
Red nightmares are light phenomena that are short-lived flashes. They are formed only above storm clouds, after larger lightning discharges. It is called red after its color, and the nightmare comes from folk beliefs.
Blue beams differ from the red nightmare in that they start directly from the top of the storm cloud and often form a narrow funnel at an altitude of 20 to 40 kilometers. They are mostly brighter than red nightmares and blue.
Ring larvae are usually fuzzy, flat-shaped atmospheric light phenomena nearly 400 kilometers in diameter and occur in the ionosphere at altitudes of about 100 kilometers.
According to Pesquet, the phenomenon seen in the recording is also one of the so-called transient bright events. Probably a blue beam, although its shape is different from the usual. Aircraft pilots have encountered similar flashes much earlier, but the phenomenon has only recently begun to be studied more thoroughly scientifically. Meanwhile, it turned out that blue beams, red nightmares, ring nightmares are not only spectacular, but can also affect the climate.
Investigations are complicated by the fact that the upper atmospheric light phenomena are difficult or not visible from Earth, the observations and data usually come from the International Space Station (ISS). Published in a 2021 issue of Nature magazine research for example, the electromagnetic waves associated with flashes have also been documented with instruments.
These new atmospheric discoveries are fascinating and show that we still have a lot to learn about how the universe works. Wrote an earlier Communication Astrid Orr from the European Space Agency (ESA).
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