North Pole eclipse enhanced brilliance of Southern Lights

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-01-13 12:44

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Stargazers in New Zealand may have enjoyed an intensified aurora following a solar eclipse at the North Pole in mid-2021. Through a simulation, researchers were able to show how the June eclipse produced oscillations in the amount of charged particles in the upper atmosphere, which travelled along the Earth’s magnetic field lines to the other side of the globe. Researchers were surprised to find that the eclipse intensified the Southern Lights more than the Northern Lights, and said that their findings could shed light on how eclipse-induced electrical activity affects satellite communication.

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Research American Geophysical Union, Web page

Media Release American Geophysical Union, Web page

Journal/
conference: Geophysical Research Letters

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Science and Technology of China

Funder: This work was supported by the B-type Strategic Priority Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB41000000), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41831070), the Project of Stable Support for Youth Team in Basic Research Field, CAS (YSBR-018), the preresearch project on Civil Aerospace Technologies No. D020105 funded by China's National Space Administration, and the Open Research Project of Large Research Infrastructures of CAS—“Study on the interaction between low/midlatitude atmosphere and ionosphere based on the Chinese Meridian Project.” Chen X. was supported by the Joint Open Fund of Mengcheng National Geophysical Observatory (No. MENGO-202105). Dang T. was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42174198, 41904138), the National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents (BX20180286), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M642525), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. B. Z. was supported by the General Research Fund (17300719 and 17308520) and the Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Hong Kong and Macau) of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41922060). We are grateful for support from the ISSI/ISSI-BJ workshop “MultiScale Magnetosphere-Ionosphere-Thermosphere Interaction.” The calculations were completed on the supercomputing system at the Supercomputing Center of the University of Science and Technology of China. The material in this paper is based in part on work supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a major facility sponsored by the US National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977.

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