A team of astronomers from Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, CSIC, Glorieta de la Astronomía, and Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya has captured spectroscopy data from a mesospheric green ghost for the first time.
Planet Earth is full of some truly awe-inspiring spectacles, but few are as intriguing as sprites, which are officially known as a transient luminous event (TLE) and consist of large-scale electric discharges that shoot upward ...
Planetary Sciences
Dec 5, 2023
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A flash of lightning, and then—something else. High above the storm, a crimson figure blinks in and out of existence. If you see it, you are a lucky witness of a sprite, one of the least-understood electrical phenomena ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 26, 2022
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This new image taken of the skies above Chile's Atacama Desert near the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) La Silla Observatory, shows bright red streaks in the sky known as red sprites. Red sprites are large-scale electrical ...
Planetary Sciences
Aug 24, 2022
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New results from NASA's Juno mission at Jupiter suggest that either "sprites" or "elves" could be dancing in the upper atmosphere of the solar system's largest planet. It is the first time these bright, unpredictable and ...
Astronomy
Oct 27, 2020
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Scientists at CU Boulder are developing a satellite about the size of a toaster oven to explore one of the cosmos' most fundamental mysteries: How did radiation from stars punch its way out of the first galaxies to fundamentally ...
Astronomy
Oct 20, 2020
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Thunderstorms can generate various forms of transient luminous events, such as red sprites, gigantic jets, and blue jets through the charge transfer involved in the lightning forged inside thunderclouds.
Earth Sciences
Sep 18, 2018
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In 2015, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen was onboard the International Space Station (ISS), photographing the tops of thunderstorms from Earth orbit. And he saw something very interesting indeed.
Space Exploration
Oct 11, 2017
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The world's smallest space probe, conceived at Menlo Park's visionary Breakthrough Starshot, has phoned home.
Space Exploration
Aug 11, 2017
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In 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner established Breakthrough Initiatives, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In April of the following year, he and the ...
Space Exploration
Jul 27, 2017
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