Strange Skies
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Question

NASA's enigmatic green lasers spotted by Japanese astronomer

Isaac Schultz
Gizmodo
Mon, 17 Apr 2023 23:58 UTC
ICESat-2
© NASA
Japanese museum curator and astronomer Daichi Fujii spotted something irregular last September in several motion-sensing cameras he had set up: three brilliant green lights that streaked across the sky.

After studying the footage and comparing it to orbital data, Fujii found the responsible party: NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite 2, or ICESat-2, which had flown over Japan that night.

According to Tony Martino, an instrument scientist for the satellite, it's the first time the team has seen footage of the instrument's lasers pulsing through the sky.

"ICESat-2 appeared to be almost directly overhead of [Fujii], with the beam hitting the low clouds at an angle," Martino said in a NASA release. "To see the laser, you have to be in the exact right place, at the right time, and you have to have the right conditions."

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ICESat-2 launched in 2018 and is used to measure the height of Earth's surfaces. It is basically a space-based lidar scanner, similar to those used by archaeologists to discover ancient sites lost to natural features like forest growth.

The video footage was captured on September 16, 2022. It shows three streaks of light zip across the sky against a backdrop of scattered clouds. Upon further scrutiny, Fujii realized the green streaks pulsed in time with a light that briefly appeared between the clouds (just above the center of the video frame, if you want to spot it yourself).
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Meteor

NASA confirms first radar-observed meteor fall seen in Maine

Camille Fine
USA Today
Wed, 12 Apr 2023 21:27 UTC
maine meteor fall
© NASAA map of the "strewn field" shows where the meteorites may have landed
A fireball that caused loud sonic booms and even lit up the daytime sky on Saturday was the first radar-observed meteorite fall seen in Maine, NASA confirmed.

"Booming" noises were heard near Calais, Maine, shortly after the fireball was seen moving through the sky. This apparent meteorite fall occurred at 11:56 a.m. local time, NASA said.

NASA's radar was able to observe the event for nearly five minutes and calculated fallen meteorite masses from 1.59 — 322 grams, or less than a pound, "although larger masses may have fallen."

Because of this, the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum in Bethel is offering a $25,000 reward for the first meteorite they get weighing one kilogram or more, the Bangor Daily News reported.
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Cassiopaea

Rare ELVE photographed during intense lightning storm over Italy


Space Weather
Mon, 27 Mar 2023 12:00 UTC
Elves
Elves
Taken by Valter Binotto on March 27, 2023 @ possagno, TV Italy
For a few milliseconds last Monday night, March 27th, an enormous red ring of light appeared in the sky over central Italy. Valter Binotto photographed it from the small town of Possagno in the foothills of the Italian Alps:

This is an "ELVE"--short for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources. It's a rare species of sprite discovered in 1990 by cameras onboard the space shuttle. Binotto may have just taken the best ever picture of one from the ground.

"The ELVE was generated by intense lightning in a storm near Ancona about 285 km south of me," says Binotto. One bolt was so strong, it generated an intense electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The red ring marks the spot where the EMP hit Earth's ionosphere. Normal lightning bolts carry 10 to 30 kilo-ampères of current; this bolt was about 10 times stronger than normal.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Info

Brightest gamma-ray burst ever detected defies explanation

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Tue, 28 Mar 2023 19:02 UTC
Scientists are taking a closer look at the afterglow left by the brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded, and what they see doesn't fit with any theoretical models.
gamma-ray burst
© NASA's Goddard Spa ce Flight CenterA NASA illustration showing the typical evolution of a long gamma-ray burst — the most common type of GRB.
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever detected is revealing new mysteries as scientists study it in greater detail.

In two new papers - one published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and another published on the preprint server arXiv and submitted for publication in the journal Nature Astronomy - astronomers found that the evolution of the radio waves released by an enormous stellar explosion seen in 2022 was slower than models predicted, raising questions about how the release of energy evolves during ultra-powerful gamma-ray bursts.

"[I]t is very difficult for existing models to replicate the slow evolution of the energy peaks that we observed," James Leung, a doctoral student at the University of Sydney who co-authored the Nature Astronomy paper, said in a statement. "This means we have to refine and develop new theoretical models to understand these most extreme explosions in the Universe."

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are brief, bright flashes of gamma-ray light that are thought to be the most powerful explosions in our universe since the Big Bang. GRBs are released during extreme stellar explosions or supernovas, when a dying star runs out of fuel and collapses into a neutron star or even a black hole. The brightest burst ever seen, known as GRB 221009A, was first detected on Oct. 9, 2022 by gamma-ray and X-ray telescopes. The likely supernova that caused the burst was 2.4 billion light-years away from Earth.
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Cassiopaea

Massive Aurora Australis solar storm seen over Tasmania, Australia and New Zealand

CLEARSKIESTV
YouTube
Sat, 25 Mar 2023 14:03 UTC
nnnnnnn
Naked eye aurora australis visible from Franklin, Tasmania on the night of 23/3/2023. All the colours visible in this footage were visible to the naked eye, which is extremely rare for Aurora.

This is easily the biggest and brightest aurora display I've seen in the 23 years I have been chasing aurora. It doesn't get much better than this from Australia.

Aurora gets such a bad wrap for being colourless, but once it got bright enough the colour receptors in my eyes suddenly switched on.

It was like upgrading from a B&W TV to full HD.


Comment: Footage from New Zealand:


View also: Auroras shine unusually far south in the US amid strongest solar storm since 2017

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Cassiopaea

Auroras shine unusually far south in the US amid strongest solar storm since 2017

Kasha Patel
Washington Post
Fri, 24 Mar 2023 20:03 UTC
NNNNN
As soon as the sun set Thursday, extreme weather photographer Peter Forister excitedly headed for the hills. Forecasts had suggested that recent storming on the surface of the sun could set off auroras — brilliant dancing streaks of light, also known as the northern lights — in the Lower 48 states. For the first hour or so into his night, his camera picked up pretty but rather demure purple hues in the sky, which appeared just as a white haze to the naked eye.

Then, within 30 seconds at around 11 p.m., the sky lit up with vibrant red and yellow streaks visible to the naked eye. Forister sprinted up a hill with his camera and pushed through bushes that scratched and tore up his legs, but "it didn't matter," he said. "It was so exciting."

"You just step back and jaw drop and just watch the show for a few minutes," Forister said. "It was really remarkable, like the kind of show that will make you stop and just catch your breath."

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Attention

Best of the Web: Earth dodges one of the fastest CMEs ever recorded

Stephen Luntz
IFL Science
Tue, 14 Mar 2023 12:00 UTC
CME solar
© NASAThe Sun mid-explosion as imaged by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The object to the bottom right is Mercury. A powerful coronal mass ejection could crash electricity transmission and bring down the Internet if directed at Earth, so it is just as well this one was traveling the other way.
Late on Monday, March 13, the Sun blasted out a coronal mass ejection (CME) traveling at at least 3,000 kilometers per second (6,700,000 miles per hour), possibly the fastest ever recorded. The expelled particles reached the Earth's orbit in less than a day. Had they hit the Earth, the results could have been catastrophic, but fortunately the CME was directed almost directly opposite. However, the explosion is a reminder the next time we may not be so lucky.


Comment: That it was 'almost directly opposite' is interesting in itself.


Despite coming from the far side of the Sun, it appears the event has caused a minor radiation storm on Earth. A smaller, and much slower, CME on Saturday that was predicted to graze the Earth may have also contributed. CMEs can affect each other, with one clearing a path for the charged particles from another. Spaceweather.com predicts shortwave radio failures for planes flying over the poles.

Comment: The following video is a recent analysis of the event:

See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Cassiopaea

Webb captures rarely seen prelude to a supernova


European Space Agency
Tue, 14 Mar 2023 22:53 UTC
A Wolf-Rayet star is a rare prelude to the famous final act of a massive star: the supernova. As one of its first observations in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope captured the Wolf-Rayet star WR 124 in unprecedented detail.

A distinctive halo of gas and dust frames the star and glows in the infrared light detected by Webb, displaying knotty structure and a history of episodic ejections. Despite being the scene of an impending stellar 'death', astronomers also look to Wolf-Rayet stars for insight into new beginnings. Cosmic dust is forming in the turbulent nebulas surrounding these stars, dust that is composed of the heavy-element building blocks of the modern Universe, including life on Earth.
Wolf-Rayet 124 (composite image)
© ESAWolf-Rayet 124 (NIRCam and MIRI composite image)
The rare sight of a Wolf-Rayet star — among the most luminous, most massive, and most briefly-detectable stars known — was one of the first observations made by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Webb shows the star WR 124 in unprecedented detail with its powerful infrared instruments. The star is 15 000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.
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Info

Shockwaves rocking the 'cosmic web' connecting galaxies seen for the 1st time

Robert Lea
Space.com
Wed, 08 Mar 2023 18:01 UTC
"We are seeing emissions from the shockwaves in the largest structures in the universe."
Composite Image
© F. Vazza, D. Wittor and J. WestA composite image of the prior 3 images data-based simulations, including radio, magnetic fields and gases.
Scientists have discovered the first evidence of shockwaves rippling through the "cosmic web," a massive network of interweaving filaments that represents the largest structure in the universe.

The discovery represents tantalizing evidence of magnetic fields weaving through the gas, dust, and dark matter tendrils which link galaxies together.

Scientists first began to think that on the largest scales, the universe is ordered in a web-like pattern with filaments that cross vast voids in space and pull galaxies into clusters in the 1960s. Two decades later using computer modeling, researchers were able to determine what this vast universal network might look like for the first time.

Astronomers have since mapped the cosmic web with actual observations in the process answering questions about its structure. One element has remained frustratingly shrouded in mystery, however: The magnetic fields that may run throughout the cosmic web.
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Grey Alien

Hundreds of UFO sightings in Southwestern Ontario since the 1990s

Trevor Wilhelm
Windsor Star
Mon, 06 Mar 2023 18:20 UTC
Triangles, spheres, boomerangs, and fireballs.

For decades, people have reported seeing UFOs of all shapes and sizes in the skies over Southwestern Ontario. Since 1991, Winnipeg-based Ufology Research has recorded 153 UFO sightings in Windsor and Essex County, including five in 2022. There have been 328 sightings since 1989 in the London region, including six last year.

A rendering of an alien spaceship or UFO in the sky.
© PHONLAMAIPHOTO / ISTOCK /Getty ImagesA rendering of an alien spaceship or UFO in the sky.
Chris Rutkowski, a writer and researcher with Ufology Research, said those sightings likely weren't alien-related. Of course, there's no way to know for sure.

"We've always been interested in the possibility of, 'are we alone in the universe?' " said Rutkowski, who has been investigating UFOs since the 1970s. "Are there other creatures like us or intelligent beings? We try to put our own lives in some perspective. There's a little bit of saviour mentality. Maybe the aliens can help figure a way out of the mess that we've made of Earth. If they've travelled all around the galaxy, maybe they're much more intelligent and have learned some of the lessons we still have to learn. So there's a little bit of that. But I think it's more we just want to know. Some reassurance that we're not alone."

Ufology Research has recorded 24,000 separate Canadian cases of UFOs, also called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), since it started collecting and analyzing data in 1989. There were 768 recorded UFO sightings across Canada in 2022.

In January 2022, a person in Windsor saw a "huge V-shaped formation of lights" fly over them before vanishing. In September, someone in Windsor saw an object that looked like "a big pill with lights all over the bottom." The last reported local sighting in 2022, described as some "stationary" and "vertical" comets, was on Dec. 21 in Essex.
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