Pink twilight. How does this rare phenomenon arise?

The beginning of November brought an extraordinary view of the northern part of Europe. As a result of the solar storm, the sky turned pink.

The result of a solar storm High-energy particles collide with the Earth’s magnetosphere And they made their way into the lower-than-normal atmosphere. This breakthrough gave rise to the extremely rare and colorful phenomenon of pink aurora.

This unusual phenomenon was noticed on November 2 by a tour group led by guide Markus Varek.

The northern lights are formed when the solar wind circulates around the magnetosphere, a stream of high-energy particles that flows from the solar corona into space. The planet’s magnetic field protects us from radiation, but this protection is naturally weaker near the poles, so the solar wind can penetrate deep into the atmosphere (100-300 km above the Earth’s surface). The solar wind excites gas molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, releasing energy and emitting light.

The most common color for aurora borealis is green because this light is emitted by excited oxygen atoms. This time, the solar wind moved deeper, spurring the nitrogen atoms, resulting in a pink neon glow. According to Varek, the aurora appeared around 6 p.m. and lasted only two minutes.

After this time, the twilight color turned green again. Six hours later, you could see the unusual blue band of light that was also visible over Sweden. She hung in the sky motionless for 30 minutes.

“It didn’t look like any aurora you’ve seen before,” says Chad Blakely, director of Lights over Lapland, an aurora-viewing company. According to spaceweather.com, even Toshi Nishimura, a physicist from Boston University, based on his video, was unable to explain the phenomenon: ‘It looks really weird if it’s the aurora,’ he says. It is difficult to explain from the point of view of auroral physics.

Another possibility is a missile flight. This is theoretically possible since the end of October Russia conducts exercises in the Barents Sea From the nuclear-powered cruiser “Piotr Wielikij”. It is known that in the past the missile exhaust left such traces, but this time, according to eyewitnesses, before the appearance of the Blue Line, no missile could be seen or heard. At the moment, the search for additional images that can help solve this mystery continues.

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