Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior.
This isn't the plot of a space soap opera; it's a finding from a trio of European Space Agency satellites known as Swarm. The research, published in the journal Earth, Planets and Space in April, finds that whereas STEVE appears before midnight and flows from east to west, a twin phenomenon occurs in the predawn hours, flowing in the opposite direction.
STEVE, it turned out, was not an aurora at all. It was a 15-mile-wide ribbon of charged gas categorized as a"subauroral ion drift." The gas was measured flowing westward at 4 miles per second — slower than the 6 miles per second motion of atmospheric gases on each side. Astronomers knew that, in a mirror image of the evening hours, a similar stream of gas flows eastward before dawn. However, no vibrant visual component like STEVE had ever been seen in association with this stream.
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