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STEVE appears over Canada during 'surprise' solar storm - Livescience.com
Aug 09, 2022 1 min, 9 secs

It looks like an aurora, but remains a phenomenon "completely unknown" to science.

In the dark of Sunday night and Monday morning (Aug. 7 and 8), a surprise solar storm slammed into Earth, showering our planet in a rapid stream of charged particles from the sun8

The resulting clash of solar and terrestrial particles in Earth's atmosphere caused stunning auroras to appear at much lower latitudes than usual — and, in southern Canada, triggered a surprise cameo from the mysterious sky phenomenon known as STEVE.

As Dyer noted, the strange sky glow called STEVE was first described by citizen scientists and aurora hunters in northern Canada in 2017?

The glowing river of light may look like an aurora, but it's actually a unique phenomenon that was considered "completely unknown" to science upon its discovery.

Whereas the northern lights occur when charged solar particles bash into molecules in Earth's upper atmosphere, STEVE appears much lower in the sky, in a region called the subauroral zone.

That likely means solar particles aren't directly responsible for STEVE, Live Science previously reported.

However, STEVE almost always appears during solar storms like Sunday's, showing up after the northern lights have already begun to fade.

One hypothesis suggests that STEVE is the result of a sudden burst of thermal and kinetic energy in the subauroral zone, somehow triggered by the clash of charged particles higher in the atmosphere during aurora-inducing solar storms.

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