New type of Northern Lights seen in Finland

A lucky group of aurora hunters recently photographed a sighting of the natural phenomenon (also known as the Northern Lights) in Finland. Researchers were pleasantly surprised to find that his particular variation of the aurora is like nothing they’ve ever encountered.

‘Following a popular guidebook project to explain auroral forms to citizen observers … a group of Finnish auroral enthusiasts reported of several events with an unexplained auroral form presenting a monochromatic wave field in the auroral emission. They named the waves as the dunes,‘ states a research paper published in science journal AGU.

Minna Palmroth, a computational science physics professor at the University of Helsinki, said the auroral form did not fit into any of the pre-existing categories of aurorae. This new form differs from typical aurorae in that they form horizontally and they occur at an unusual altitude, about 100km from the earth’s surface according to Lonely Planet.

Palmroth’s team is unsure of what is causing the dunes to occur in this way say that they may reflect where oxygen is most dense in the mesosphere. ‘The differences in brightness within the dune waves could be due to either waves in the precipitating particles coming from space, or in the underlying atmospheric oxygen atoms,’ she says. ‘We ended up proposing that the dunes are a result of increased oxygen atom density.’