Aug. 20, 2018: A new type of aurora nicknamed “STEVE” may not be an aurora at all, according to a new paper published August 20th in the Geophysical Research Letters. A group of researchers combined satellite data with ground-based imagery of STEVE during a geomagnetic storm to investigate how STEVE is formed. “Our main conclusion is that STEVE is not an aurora,” said Bea Gallardo-Lacourt, a space physicist at the University of Calgary in Canada and lead author of the new study.

STEVE is a purple ribbon of light that amateur astronomers in Canada have been photographing for decades, belatedly catching the attention of the scientific community in 2016. It doesn’t look exactly like an aurora, but it often appears alongside auroras during geomagnetic storms. Is it an aurora — or not? That’s what Gallardo-Lacourt’s team wanted to find out.

Auroras appear when energetic particles from space rain down on Earth’s atmosphere during geomagnetic storms. If STEVE is an aurora, they reasoned, it should form in much the same way. On March 28, 2008, STEVE appeared over eastern Canada just as NOAA’s Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite 17 (POES-17) passed overhead. The satellite, which can measure the rain of charged particles that causes auroras, went directly above the purple ribbon. Gallardo-Lacourt’s team looked carefully at the old data and found … no rain at all.

“Our results verify that this STEVE event is clearly distinct from the aurora borealis since it is characterized by the absence of particle precipitation,” say the researchers. “Interestingly, its skyglow could be generated by a new and fundamentally different mechanism in Earth’s ionosphere.”

Another study has shown that STEVE appears most often in spring and fall. With the next equinox only a month away, new opportunities to study STEVE are just around the corner. Stay tuned and, meanwhile, read the original research here.

Realtime STEVE Photo Gallery