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New Simulations Unravel Mystery Behind Aurora’s ‘String of Pearls’
A newly developed computer model has captured the intense activity of Earth’s magnetic field at both small and large scales to address two unanswered questions: why the aurora sometimes looks like a string of shimmering pearls, and whether those “pearls” are harbingers of upcoming magnetic activity.
Developed by researchers at the NASA DRIVE Science Center for Geospace Storms (CGS), which is headquartered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, the team’s ability to find answers to these questions represents an unprecedented advancement in magnetospheric modeling.
“That we can now model geospace at this scale is very exciting because it’s a new capability that allows us to connect what people see 100 kilometers up in the aurora to what’s happening 50,000 kilometers away in space.” said Kareem Sorathia, a physicist at APL and the lead author on the study.
Their findings were published July 28 in Geophysical Research Letters.
Auroras can take on an assortment of shapes, including these auroral beads, which resemble a miles-long string of pearls. These shapes offer a window to the happenings of Earth’s magnetosphere, but what causes them is often an enigma.
Credit: Vincent Guth on Unsplash
Credit: Kareem Sorathia/Slava Merkin/American Geophysical Union
To the common spectator, auroras are mostly a ghostly dance of color in the sky. But to researchers, the aurora’s twisting shapes and sometimes turbulent activities are a figurative window into the happenings of Earth’s magnetosphere.
Particularly curious have been the relatively small, bead-like shapes the aurora takes on before bright, auroral shows at Earth’s higher latitudes. These shows, called auroral substorms, occur when Earth’s magnetic field lines, stretched behind Earth by the Sun’s solar wind like a tail, link together and slingshot back toward Earth, carrying charged particles that create the light show.
Whether auroral beads are a type of canary in the coal mine, portending an oncoming substorm, or whether they’re spectators that happen to appear for the show has been an enduring mystery.
By combining high-resolution models of Earth’s magnetosphere and upper atmosphere in the Grid Agnostic Magnetohydrodynamics for Extended Research Applications (GAMERA) tool, and using some of the world’s largest supercomputers, the authors captured the interplay between processes in the upper atmosphere and the more distant magnetotail.
Their simulations were able to recreate these auroral beads and showed they’re just along for the ride.
“In fact, we find that the configuration to create these beads can be quite common and appear at different times,” said physicist Slava Merkin, a coauthor on the study and the director of CGS.