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music throughout

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Liz MacDonald: People were out observing the aurora, and they started noticing something that was overhead

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as well, when they were seeing aurora far to the northern regions.

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It was unlike most aurora. Talked to the scientists,

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we didn't know what it was. And together, 

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they said we will keep taking observations, and we will call it Steve

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in the meantime. Steve is mostly a very narrow purple arc

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and sometimes it has these little green features

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that go along with it as well that are kind of like waving fingers

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or a picket fence. That means that there's plasma physics

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happening up there to cause that light and to make these

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little discrete features that we don't understand yet.

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We now have some satellite observations from the ESA satellite

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called SWARM that show that Steve

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optically is associated with a very strong flow

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in the particles in the ionosphere, the upper level of our atmosphere.

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Steve is important for a number of reasons. It's really

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exciting that people armed with cameras

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all over the globe can capture something that we didn't fully understand

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and shed new light on that.

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It's also really exciting that this happens further to the south where there are more people.

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So, it might be a kind of aurora that more people can see than the usual kind.

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We are now able to look up at the sky and see

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things about the aurora and this sub-auroral region

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that we never understood before.

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We can correlate that with our traditional observations and lead to greater

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understanding. 

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Thank you to the citizen scientists around the world who help us explore as one.

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Join the search for STEVE at www.aurorasaurus.org

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tone

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tone

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beeping

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beeping