Nasa astronaut releases videos of dazzling green auroras captured from space
Nasa astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station has unveiled videos of dazzling auroras captured from the orbiting laboratory.
One of the videos, which he shared recently on X, shows spectacular green lights glowing below the space station as it flies over the southern hemisphere.
'The aurora seen today from the space station while orbit was passing between Australia and Antartica,' Mr Pettit posted on X earlier this week.
Another video he shared on the social media platform this week shows aurora in the form of a 'green vaporous turbulence' above Earth as the ISS flies by.
Auroras are caused when bursts of charged particles released from the Sun – known as coronal mass ejections or CMEs – interact with the Earth's magnetic field.
The space weather phenomenon is called aurora australis in the southern hemisphere and aurora borealis in the northern hemisphere.
Aurora lights may be of different colours depending on different molecules in the atmosphere getting charged by the geomagnetic storm.
For instance, oxygen in the form of O₂ gas or as ozone in the upper atmosphere, gives off a fluorescent green hue while nitrogen tends to gives a blue, red, or sometimes pink colour.
Since the Earth's magnetic field is the strongest at the poles, auroras are seen more distinctly in the skies near the polar regions.
Mr Pettit, 69, is a spaceflight veteran and the oldest astronaut aboard the space station.
He has logged over 370 days in space overall and conducted over 13 hours of spacewalk.
The Nasa astronaut is known for the variety of photographs he takes from the space station, including of space weather phenomena or onboard science experiments, which he regularly shares on X.
On Friday, he shared a timelapse video of Elon Musk's Starlink satellites flying in formation, tracing parallel lines in the sky.
Earlier this month, he posted a short six-second video captured straight below the space station of flashes of upper atmospheric lightning.
These flashes, called Transient Luminous Events (TLE), reveal a range of lightning phenomenon above the Amazon basin.
The clip includes several types of TLE above the South American region, including sprites and blue jets.
Mr Pettit is currently on his fourth ISS mission, serving as a flight engineer.
He arrived at the ISS in September aboard Russia's Soyuz spacecraft along with two other cosmonauts – Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner.
The trio are expected to return to Earth later in April.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NBC News
6 hours ago
- NBC News
These cosmic monsters are creating the biggest explosions since the big bang
The vast emptiness of space is growing emptier one star at a time. That's because 80 billion lightyears from Earth, three cosmic beasts are devouring stars ten times the size of the sun. In a new study by the University of Hawaii, among others, astronomers scouring through NASA and European Space Agency's data said they had discovered three supermassive black holes. Those behemoths feast on stars of such a size that make the one at the center of the solar system look like a light snack. The explosions those scientists have recorded, which happened when those black holes shredded and sucked up the fabric of those stars, are the largest since the big bang that created the universe. 'What I think is so exciting about this work is that we're pushing the upper bounds of what we understand to be the most energetic environments of the universe,' Anna Payne, a staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the study, said in the NASA article. Black holes are astronomical objects invisible to the human eye. They have a gravitational pull so strong that they swallow everything, including light. A supermassive black hole is the biggest of all black holes, sitting at the center of galaxies like the one at the heart of the Milky Way slowly sucking planets and all other matter toward it. When a star gets trapped in the pull of a supermassive black hole, it can disintegrate with a spectacular explosion in a cosmic event that scientists in a new study published this week in the journal Science Advances call 'extreme nuclear transient.' 'These events are the only way we can have a spotlight that we can shine on otherwise inactive massive black holes,' University of Hawaii graduate student Jason Hinkle said in a separate NASA article. Hinkle is the lead author of the new study that describes for the first time two such events that took place over the past decade. Two of the three supermassive black holes were detected in 2016 and 2018 by an ESA mission and are documented for the first time in the study. The third, nicknamed 'Barbie' because of its catalog identifier ZTF20abrbeie, was identified in 2020 by a Caltech observatory in California and subsequently documented in 2023. The blasts are so powerful that the only cosmic event larger in magnitude has been the big bang that sparked the dawn of the universe. Unlike in other stellar explosions, though, the way X-ray, optical light and ultraviolet rays dimmed and brightened in these incidents made it clear this event was a 'black hole ripping a star apart,' the NASA article said. NASA says black holes actually brighten during these cosmic events and that brightness lasts for several months. That brightness has given scientists a new way to find more black holes in the early distant universe. When astronomers peer into space, they are looking back in time because the further away they look, the older the light is reaching them — the light reaching Earth from the sun, for example, is eight minutes old. 'We can take these three objects as a blueprint to know what to look for in the future,' Payne said.
Daily Mail
6 hours ago
- Daily Mail
The influential Trump advisor who triggered the president's spectacular split with Elon Musk
President Donald Trump 's surprise decision to change Elon Musk 's preferred pick to lead NASA may have done more to fuel the historic blowup between the two men than previously known. The president canceled his nomination of Jared Isaacman as NASA's administrator after Musk officially left the White House on Friday. Isaacman, a billionaire, pilot, and astronaut, was close with Musk and even flew to space with Musk's Dragon program on Operation Polaris Dawn in 2024. But he had a history of donating funds to Democrats, including recent Democratic candidates who ran against GOP senators Tim Sheehy of Montana and Bernie Moreno of Ohio in 2024. Despite his donations, Isaacman was approved by the Senate committee in April and was expected to get confirmed this week in the Senate. But Trump's advisor Sergio Gor, in charge of managing the White House personnel office, reportedly delivered Trump a list of Isaacman's donations to Democrats according to reporting from Axios. Gor did not appreciate Musk's involvement in personnel matters, the report noted, as they had a tense relationship. 'This was Sergio's out-the-door 'f**k you' to Musk,' one White House official said. Trump and Musk spoke about Issacson's record prior to their press conference last Friday. Despite their conversation, Trump pulled Issacson's nomination on Saturday. 'After a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA,' Trump wrote on his Truth Social site. Musk responded to the news with disappointment 'It is rare to find someone so competent and good-hearted,' Musk wrote of Isaacman on X. The president mused Thursday that Musk's personal attacks might have been trigged by his decision. 'I know that disturbed him He wanted and rightfully recommended somebody that I guess he knew very well. I'm sure he respected him, to run NASA. But I didn't think it was appropriate. He happened to be a Democrat, like totally Democrat,' Trump said, adding that the administration had the right to nominate a Republican to the position.
BBC News
7 hours ago
- BBC News
ASKAP J1832: Scientists discovers mysterious pulsating star in space
Scientists say they've spotted a mysterious object in space behaving in a very strange star, which has been named ASKAP J1832, is acting unlike anything seen before, according to Nasa around 15,000 light years from Earth, it is pulsing every 44 even more strange is that it is doing it with both radio waves and X-rays. What did scientists find? A team of astronomers looked at data from Nasa's space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Australia to study the discovered object, which has been called ASKAP found that the star belongs to a class of objects called "long period radio transients" - that means it sends out radio waves of different levels over tens of minutes - in this case every 44 they also found that it is also sending X-rays every 44 minutes to Nasa, this combination of factors is "unlike anything astronomers have seen in the Milky Way galaxy."Experts are trying to work out what type of object ASKAP J1832, however they think it might be one of two could be a magnetar - which is a neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field, with an age of more than half a million it could also be possibly an unusual white dwarf star which has a companion star.
