Newly found Martian auroras defy easy explanation

Scientists with the United Arab Emirates have spotted aworm-like atmosphere on Mars.

The discovery of the "sinuous"Auroras, or shining lights high in the atmosphere arising from solar activity interacting with magnetic fields, came from observations from the Hope orbiter, which has been at work since February 2021. Mars has a patchy magnetic field, making it difficult to track down the Auroras. Hope has helped with better observations of the local, nighttime Aurora varieties.

The other types of lights are not close to the scale of the new sinuous discreteAuroras, which wrapped around half the planet. Hope was able to take whole disk snaps of the thin Martian atmosphere at that scale.

Hessa Al Matroushi, the EMM science lead, said in an email that they are seeing effects on a massive scale.

There is a Hope mission to Mars in photos.

There are a variety of factors that cause the Martian Auroras. The solar wind is a constant stream of charged particles that flows off our sun, and hydrogen in the thin Martian atmosphere, which causes the protons to form.

The diffuse aurora is caused by intense solar storms and the newly identified sinuous aurora is more similar to it.

Hope was able to observe a solar storm on Mars. When the sun's 11-year solar cycle is predicted to peak, there will be more solar storms.

Scientists hope that better understanding of the appearance of the sinuous discrete aurora and other auroral features could hone their understanding of the solar wind and the ways Martian magnetism affects the planet.

There is a lot of new information here, since we have seen incredible new patterns of the Aurora since the first observations.

There is no detailed explanation yet. The European Space Agency's Mars Express and NASA's MAVEN are two of the missions that have gathered archival data.

Rob Lillis, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who works on the Emirates Mars ultraviolet spectrometer instrument, said that the sinuous discrete aurora was a shocking discovery that has us scratching our heads and going back to the drawing board.

We have ideas, but no solid explanation for why we are observing the intense Aurora at planetary scales.

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