Mysterious ribbon of blue light appears over Sweden
A mysterious ribbon of blue light appeared over Abisko, Sweden during a G1 – Minor geomagnetic storm on November 3, 2022.
The phenomenon, which seems to defy orthodox aurora physics, might be a previously unrecognized form of Northern Lights, Dr. Tony Phillips of the SpaceWeather reports.1
However, Chad Blakley, the director of Lights over Lapland, who obviously witnessed a lot of auroras in his life, said it didn’t look like any auroras he has ever seen before.
Miquel Such, one of the Lights over Lapland tour guides, video-recorded the phenomenon:
The phenomenon appeared in webcams at 16:16 UTC and then rapidly brightened to naked-eye visibility before sinking below the horizon 30 minutes later. The whole time, regular green auroras danced around and seemingly in front of it, Phillips notes.
“It looks really odd if it’s aurora,” Space physicist Toshi Nishimura of Boston University said after watching the video.
“One auroral arc shouldn’t cut across another auroral arc without disturbing it, so it’s hard to explain this from an auroral physics point of view.”
One of the possible reasons behind this phenomenon is ICBM firing exercise, known to produce displays like this, but no one there saw a rocket and multiple witnesses agree that nothing streaked across the sky before the blue band appeared.
Any photographers who caught the phenomenon are encouraged to submit their images to SpaceWeather as photos from different locations may help determine the height of the emission. If anyone saw a rocket, please contact Dr. Tony Phillips (spaceweather.com).
References:
1 Mysterious blue ‘auroras’ over Sweden – November 3, 2022 – SpaceWeather.com
Teo Blašković founded The Watchers in 2011 and edited it until 2026, covering seismic and volcanic activity, extreme weather, space weather and near-Earth objects. Articles on this page are his archive.
Published in the last 24 hours
- Northern lights are possible at high latitudes on November 17 and 18 as NOAA forecasts minor (G1) geomagnetic storms from coronal hole wind
- Winds circling the North Pole have slowed sharply this month, the same kind of disruption that in January 2019 split the polar vortex and sent Chicago to minus 23°F, cold enough that rail crews ran flames along the tracks Epicenter
- In April 2014, golden-winged warblers in the mountains of Tennessee, songbirds weighing about as much as four dimes, fled their breeding grounds a day or two before a tornado outbreak and flew hundreds of miles south, while the scientists tracking them sheltered in a Waffle House Epicenter
- After record Nordic heatwave, Swedish researchers to recreate indoor heat to study older adults Epicenter
