Scientists have identified the phenomenon as a polar rain aurora, never seen before from the ground.
On December 25 and 26, 2022, researchers documented a rare polar rain aurora from Longyearbyen, Norway, seen above beneath the more common aurora borealis. Polar rain auroras form via a different mechanism than a typical aurora and are extremely hard to observe.In the wee hours one Christmas morning on the arctic island of Svalbard, Norway, a fisheye lens pointed up at a bright green night sky.
Due to the solar wind’s wide variety of high-energy particles, solar wind electrons typically do not have enough energy to create visible auroras upon arriving at Earth. But once they get trapped by the planet’s magnetic field and excited, the electrons interact with the atoms in our atmosphere and produce auroras. The light shows appear around Earth’s poles, but rarely over the polar caps themselves.
Polar rain auroras have been caught in satellite data before, but never from ground cameras on Earth. Hosokawa happened upon the 2022 aurora by accident, after taking a break during the holidays from his weekly routine of checking aurora cameras. When he was casually reviewing the backlog of data, he discovered the aurora like a belated Christmas present.
Solar wind is constantly flowing out into the solar system from the sun’s corona, so it is very unusual to see it all but disappear. “A once-in-20-years” type of experience, Hosokawa calls it, referencing the only otherThe lack of solar wind made Hosokawa’s polar rain aurora exceptionally bright and, thus, easier to see from the ground. The dual observations from the ground and space are essential to understanding both the fine details and large-scale patterns of the aurora.
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