Press Release: September 24, 2018

When 17 years ago astronomers for the first time pointed a 1000 frames per second camera to the sky to look at meteors, known as shooting stars, they detected a surprising new phenomenon. The bright meteor of a few meters in size was engulfed in a glowing halo of hundreds of meters in size. There has been no convincing explanation for this halo, until now
A new study by a team of scientists has revealed that the meteor halo might share similarities to the aurora glow. This opens up an entirely new avenue in the exploration of meteors and their interaction with the Earth’s atmosphere. Their study is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and it describes a two-step process that leads to the appearance of this glow. Nastavi čitati →