Pulsating Auroras Spotted Tearing Themselves Apart in Night Sky

Bizarre blobs of glowing light were spotted floating in the night sky in the aftermath of a solar storm, mystifying viewers.

The strange sight occurred on April 23, when a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun was smashing into the Earth’s atmosphere, causing a “severe” G4-class geomagnetic storm.

Skygazers were primed to watch the auroras that usually occur during a CME-triggered geomagnetic storm, but as some in Europe watched, the aurora began to change into the unusual blobs.

“I had never seen anything quite like it,” Heiko Ulbricht of Saxony, Germany, told SpaceWeather.com. “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 said. “My pulse was still racing hours later.”

Social media users uploaded Ulbricht’s picture, marveling at the sight.

These were actually proton aurora, caused by Earth’s invisible planetary rings made of electricity, called ring currents. They consist of electrically charged ions, which flow around the Earth in a massive ring of electrical current.

During particularly strong geomagnetic storms, caused by the plume of solar plasma from a CME hitting the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, protons from this ring system can rain down on our planet. This causes a secondary shower of electrons that react with gases in our atmosphere, causing these strangely behaving auroras.

Brett Carter, an associate professor in space science at Australia’s RMIT University, previously told Newsweek: “The different colors are the result of electrons relaxing from different energy levels from oxygen—the most common reds and greens—and nitrogen—dark reds/blues.”

Unlike normal auroras, which are triggered by CME particles and particles from the Earth’s magnetosphere hitting the atmosphere, these proton auroras are caused by the Earth’s invisible rings. Proton auroras also tend to pulsate because of plasma wave activity in Earth’s ring current. They appear more often during sunset, as the Earth’s magnetosphere pushes the protons toward the dusk side of the planet.

However, the exact reason for the auroras tearing themselves apart in such a bizarre way is still unknown.

“We still don’t know why proton auroras seem to tear themselves apart in such a dramatic way,” space physicist Toshi Nishimura of Boston University told SpaceWeather.com. “This is a question for future research.”

These proton auroras were also seen over France, Denmark and Poland.

During the same geomagnetic storm, normal auroras were seen more south than usual because of the strength of the storm. Photos on social media captured the northern lights as far south as California, as well as in Illinois, Wyoming and Nevada.

Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about auroras? Let us know via [email protected].