The residents of the frostbitten rural area of Tromsø, Norway, witnessed a sky filled with an unusual pink-orange light, suspected to be caused by a plasma ball or a type of intense cosmic wind slicing through the Earth’s magnetosphere.
According to Space, mesmerizing photos captured in Norway on December 10 are sparking debates among astronomers, as something resembling an aurora but not quite an aurora appeared: Instead of green light, a strange pink-orange phenomenon was dancing across the sky.
Photographer Markus Varik, a specialist in hunting for auroras who has spent many years observing this strange “Northern Light” and is the owner of several photographs taken on the night of December 10, admitted he had never seen anything like it.
Strange phenomenon occurring in Norway – (Photo: Markus Varik).
Scientists believe the most plausible explanation for this unusual aurora is a very special coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun. These plasma balls are expelled when the Sun is agitated and typically create auroras when colliding with the Earth’s magnetosphere.
However, an unusual thing happened: They searched through space weather data and found no recent CME events.
Rare pink-orange light flooding the sky – (Photo: Markus Varik).
Scientists from the Royal Greenwich Observatory in the UK pointed to another possible cause: an unusually strong solar wind from our Sun that penetrated deeply into the Earth’s atmosphere, cutting into the region 100 km above the planet’s surface.
At that point, this treacherous solar wind tore through the magnetosphere and atmosphere, interacting with nitrogen to create a mesmerizing stream of pink-orange light, rather than producing green light as it would when interacting with oxygen at higher altitudes.
This was actually inferred indirectly from an event in November, when a pink aurora appeared after a geomagnetic storm—caused by cosmic fireworks expelled by the Sun—that tore through the magnetosphere and allowed the solar wind to dive deep into the atmosphere.
What truly happened in this phenomenon that seems to be even greater than on December 10 remains a mystery.
