My lovely Arts Editor directs my attention to Steve … the low Earth orbit phenomenon. From Smithsonian.com:
Image: Raymond J. Stinson, Alberta Aurora Chasers
Facebook is a place to share dramas and dog pictures, hit “like” and watch weird events unfold live. But for a group of amateur skywatchers, the social network is also a place to share information about what people spy in the sky. And thanks to a group of Canadian aurora enthusiasts, an entirely new type of atmospheric phenomenon has been documented.
It’s called Steve, and its origins are a bit more exciting than its straightforward name would suggest. The Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group first spotted the phenomenon last year, reports Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky, and has been collecting photos of Steve sightings. The name Steve reflects their confusion about the phenomenon’s origins, Dvorsky writes, and reminded someone of the movie Over the Hedge “in which a character arbitrarily conjures up the name Steve to describe an object he’s not sure about.” …
[Eric] Donovan [of the University of Calgary] was able to pinpoint Swarm data taken while a [Swarm] satellite flew through the Steve phenomenon, according to an ESA press release. The data didn’t show a proton aurora. Instead, it showed something that had never been observed before: a temperature spike of over 5400 degrees Fahrenheit in a spot about 186 miles above Earth’s surface combined with a gas ribbon over 15 miles wide that was flowing west more slowly than the other gases that surrounded it.
An upcoming paper supposedly will give an explanation – or at least a hypothesis.
