A cohort of telescopes captured a special type of aurora that hung across the night sky like a glowing jeweled necklace, helping astronomers better understand the mechanics behind these beautiful light shows.
Known as aurora borealis, this round auroras appear in groups scattered across the sky, while more traditional auroras appear flatter and more elongated. A group of 13 spacecraft, including the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cluster mission, observed the process that creates aurora borealis on Earth’s day side, or sun side, and offers new clues as to how these unique auroras form.
Auroras are caused by electrical storms or charged particles emitted by the Sun† Observations collected on Nov. 6, 2018, revealed that vortexes at the edge of Earth’s magnetosphere — the magnetic field that surrounds our planet and protects it from solar radiation — allow some of the sun’s charged particles to tunnel toward Earth’s surface, causing streams of aurora beads, according to a statement from ESA†
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The spacecraft was located on Earth’s night side, near the planet’s magnetopause, the thin boundary at the outer edge of the magnetosphere. While some of the spacecraft observed the vortices, others observed the streams of particles moving towards . flocked Soil† Combining these observations allowed researchers to study the entire process of aurora grain formation for the first time, the statement said.
“This discovery demonstrates that the Cluster spacecraft is part of a ‘magnetospheric orchestra’ of missions that together enable additional science not possible with each single mission,” said Philippe Escoubet, project scientist for ESA’s Cluster mission, in the statement. .
The vortex-like eddies that give solar particles a fast orbit form when: solar wind blows past the magnetopause of the earth, like wind that sets oceans and clouds in motion. In turn, electrons spiral from the solar wind to the magnetosphere, eventually reaching Earth’s upper atmosphere, where the electrons interact with hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. This causes the molecules to glow, forming round aurora beads that appear to be strung across the sky.
“It’s great to use multi-satellite missions to make connections between the dynamics at the edge of the magnetosphere and what we see in the ionosphere far below,” said Steven Petrinec, a physicist at Lockheed Martin Space and lead author of a study detailing the findings, in the statement. “Make multiple mission observations wherever possible to understand the links between different processes within the large and complex system.”
These observations show how using multiple spacecraft positioned at different vantage points can provide a more comprehensive view of space. The group of instruments included four spacecraft from ESA’s Cluster mission, NASA’s four Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft, three Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms spacecraft, the Geotail satellite and a US Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellite.
The findings were published in the journal Frontiers in astronomy and space science†
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