There is a great deal of citizen scientists dotted around the world that loves nothing more than stargazing late at night. For some of these people, it’s more than just a hobby; it’s a passion. And without many of these people, scientists would know a lot less than they do now about what’s out there and beyond.





Between 2015 and 2016 around 30 reports of a purple ribbon of light had been reported in various online forums and with a group of scientists working together on a project called Aurorasaurus. Funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, Aurorasaurus is a citizen project set up to track the aurora borealis and is led by space scientist Liz MacDonald.

Even though people were snapping away at this phenomenon, they were still unsure as to what it was. Eventually, administrator of the Facebook group Alberta Aurora Chasers, Chris Ratzlaff decided to name the phenomenon and called it Steve for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. A lot of people were observing Steve at that time. And because of that, scientists are now much more clued up as to how the Earth’s magnetic fields interact with charged space particles.





“This is a light display that we can observe over thousands of kilometers from the ground,” said MacDonald. “It corresponds to something happening way out in space. Gathering more data points on Steve will help us understand more about its behavior and its influence on space weather.”

One of the key things scientists took away from this study is the discovery that Steve is not like other auroras. Usually, auroras appear in an oval shape, in blues, greens, and reds and last for hours. Steve, however, is purple with a little green. It’s a line in the sky that people reported seeing anywhere between 20 minutes to 1 hour before it disappeared. Another way in which Steve differs from that of a normal aurora is that it appears at much lower altitudes.

However, the biggest discovery about Steve was probably relating to that what appeared in the satellite data. This showed how Steve is made up of sub auroral ion drift or SAID for short. “People have studied a lot of SAIDs, but we never knew it had a visible light,” said Donovan, a co-author of the study. “Now our cameras are sensitive enough to pick it up, and people’s eyes and intellect were critical in noticing its importance.”





Steve is an extremely important discovery for many reasons. For one, it’s located in an area most other auroras don’t. For another, Steve is constantly appearing in the presence of auroras in the auroral zone. “Steve can help us understand how the chemical and physical processes in Earth’s upper atmosphere can sometimes have noticeable effects in lower parts of Earth’s atmosphere,” said MacDonald. “This provides good insight into how Earth’s system works as a whole.”

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