.
.
Earth’s rings ‘are made of electricity–a donut-shaped circuit carrying millions of amps around our planet.’ But proton auroras are ‘still mysterious’.
May 15, 2023: Europeans are still trying to wrap their minds around what happened after sunset on April 23, 2023. Everyone knew that a CME was coming; photographers were already outside waiting for auroras. But when the auroras appeared, they were very strange.
“I had never seen anything quite like it,” says Heiko Ulbricht of Saxony, Germany. “The auroras began to tear themselves apart, pulsating as they formed individual blobs that floated high in the sky.”
“It literally took my breath away,” he says. “My pulse was still racing hours later!” The same blobs were sighted in France and Poland, and in Denmark they were caught flashing like a disco strobe light.
Ordinary auroras don’t act like this.
Indeed, “these were not ordinary auroras,” confirms space physicist Toshi Nishimura of Boston University. “They are called ‘proton auroras,’ and they come from Earth’s ring current system.”
Most people don’t…
View original post 286 more words
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
“Europeans are still trying to wrap their minds around what happened after sunset”. To Finnish amateur photographers the event however was in no way surprise. More than 70 individual observers from Europe had already contributed into gathering the background observation data for the paper, that for the first time describes this rare type of proton aurora with not one (as in “blob aurora”) but _two_ color layers.
The combination of green and red arcs evolve into a SAR arc, _after_ the stream of ions disappear. So the red arc over the blob aurora is not a SAR arc. The combination of two arcs is something, that was later named ‘Red Arc with Green Diffuse Aurora”. Some shorten it for practical reasons to RAGDA. There are already more than 30 identified events with this type of aurora, most from Europe.
Oh! ? So I’m no the only other one to not see the normal. Funny how this is only now surfacing. To me this is an almost regular occurrence and don’t make much of it: much like the Seals and dolphins hopping around in the M Firth. I was on an Industrial Site today with a fancy machine: Bairns would have been gawping and waving, in the expectation of some eye-contact and what follows on, but these geezers, …. Head down, see nothing, know nothing or even Less. Juist like walking the Streets of the Inner Cities: Daren’t make Eye contact… as a Mannie said to me recently, “they’d think you were going to do something awful to them”. country folk can look anyone straight in the eye.
Maybe Heiko should have been out more often. Menschens Kinder – I thocht die Germans were really in to outdoor events. No doubt a Model will be made and appear in due course. Dankeschön.
[…] Mysterious “Aurora Blobs” Explained […]