Special – Marwa Al-Batta
A stunning new image shows a bright orange aurora dancing in the night sky over Canada, but the aurora should never be this color, so what’s going on?
There is nothing in Earth’s atmosphere that could produce the vibrant orange color of the aurora borealis like the one shown.
Expert interpretation:
A haunting new image reveals that a solar storm recently struck Earth, creating what appear to be bright, pumpkin-colored columns dancing in the night sky over Canada. But there’s a problem with the image: the orange-colored aurora shouldn’t be there.
Instead of the impossible aurora, the image captured a rare mix of red and green lights that haven’t been seen to this extent since a monster Halloween solar storm struck Earth 20 years ago, experts say.
Aurora photographer Harlan Thomas said: “The orange color was amazing, incredible. The pillars in the center stayed glowing there for more than 20 minutes.”
Thomas captured this colorful shot on October 19 over a pond west of Calgary, Alberta, about three days after the Sun unleashed a massive, slow coronal mass ejection (CME) toward Earth.
Auroras are created when high-energy particles from a coronal ejection or solar wind bypass the Earth’s magnetic shield, or magnetosphere, and heat gas molecules in the upper atmosphere. The excited particles release energy in the form of light, and the color of this light depends on the excited element. The two most common colors of aurora borealis are red and green, both of which are produced by oxygen molecules at different altitudes (red aurora are produced at higher altitudes than green variants). But when solar particles penetrate deep into the atmosphere, they can also trigger rare pink aurora when they excite nitrogen molecules.
In theory, oxygen and nitrogen molecules can give off orange wavelengths under certain conditions, however, even when this happens, the orange color is drowned out by other colors emitted by the molecules around it, making it practically impossible to see these wavelengths.
How did we see this color?
“It is possible that the two processes are being confused,” said Kilmar Oksavik, a space weather scientist and aurora expert at the University of Bergen, Norway. [الشفق الأحمر والأخضر]“This tricks the camera and the eye into thinking it is orange.” “In reality, it is red and green at the same time.”
Although red and green aurorae frequently occur together in the sky, “orange” aurora are very rare, and Oksavik said the orange color is most noticeable at the center of large auroral rays — vertical columns of light lined up along invisible magnetic field lines. – which consists of red and green light, which is very uncommon.
The last time these vibrant, pumpkin-like colors were seen was the Great Halloween Storm of 2003, the most powerful solar storm in modern records. During this epic event, orange lights were spotted across North America and northern Europe.
