A camera captured the vast, diffuse glow produced after the solar wind dropped to a whisper On Christmas night in 2022, a massive aurora lit up the sky for thousands of kilometres around the North Pole. The light show gave scientists a unique glimpse of the elusive ‘polar rain aurora’, a rare shimmering phenomenon that forms when energetic electrons from the Sun cascade onto Earth’s polar regions. Auroras form when charged particles flowing from the Sun hit and interact with Earth’s magnetic field. Their energy is usually transformed into light shows of dancing green curtains, towering red pillars, or other spectacles such as those that dazzled skywatchers around the world in May. Polar rain auroras are a special type that form when electrons travelling directly from the Sun's co...
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Zombie Siberian wildfires send its smoke to North Pole for the first time
For the first time in recorded history, hazy smoke from raging wildfires in the Arctic has reached the North Pole, and NASA satellites have the images to prove it. On Aug. 6, the space agency's MODIS, an imaging sensor on the Aqua satellite, captured true-color images of what NASA called a "vast, thick, and acrid blanket of smoke" that clouded the North Pole. The smoke originated from enormous blazes in the Siberian region of northern Russia. According to China's Xinhua news agency, the Mongolian capital city of Ulaanbaatar was blanketed in "white smoke," NPR reported. The republic of Yakutia – home to Oymyakon, the coldest inhabited place on Earth – has also been shrouded in smoke, as captured by MODIS images on Aug. 8. A vast, thick, and acrid blanket of smoke emitted from hund...
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