A NASA intern has discovered a new type of aurora borealis in three-year-old video footage of the Arctic sky observed from an island in Norway. Usually aurorae are caused by high-energy particles from the sun, but there were no eruptions on the sun pushing against the Earth’s magnetic field on the day of the newly discovered aurora. The intern, Jennifer Briggs, a physics student at Pepperdine University, and her colleagues believe the crunch may have been caused by a storm at the edge of Earth’s magnetic bubble. This would be the first time researchers have seen an aurora caused solely by a compression of Earth’s magnetic field. “This motion is something that we’ve never seen before,” Briggs said in a press conference. “This eastward and then westward and then spiraling motion is not something that we’ve ever seen, not something we currently understand.”
