(ORDO NEWS) ā On clear Martian nights, long snake-like ribbons of light can pierce the Red Planetās sky for thousands of miles.
These can be planetary-wide āscattered aurorasā that glow faintly across the sky during strong solar storms, or ādiscrete aurorasā that glow only over certain areas of the Martian sky.
According to researchers from the United Arab Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), the newly discovered type of aurora seems to be a āweird mishmashā that incorporates the features of several known species. Experts have called them āwinding discrete auroras.ā
Visible only over parts of the Martian landscape, a new type of aurora emerged during a recent solar storm when charged electrons swept over the Red Planetās thin atmosphere.
As these particles swept down the magnetic field lines in the atmosphere, long ātentaclesā of light zigzagged across the sky from the planetās day side to the night side, spanning half the diameter of Mars.
The cause of this newly discovered Martian aurora remains a mystery.
āThe tortuous, discrete aurora was a shocking discovery that in many ways has us scratching our heads and back to the drawing board,ā said Rob Lillis, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who works on the EMM ultraviolet spectrometer.
āWe have ideas, but no convincing explanation of why we are seeing intense auroras of this shape and on a planetary scale.ā
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