{"id":9272,"date":"2017-05-01T07:57:31","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T12:57:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=9272"},"modified":"2017-05-01T07:57:31","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T12:57:31","slug":"just-call-it-steve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2017\/05\/01\/just-call-it-steve\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Call It Steve"},"content":{"rendered":"

My lovely Arts Editor directs my attention to Steve … the low Earth orbit phenomenon. From<\/a> Smithsonian.com<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n
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Image: Raymond J. Stinson, Alberta Aurora Chasers<\/strong><\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Facebook is a place to share dramas and dog pictures, hit \u201clike\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s called Steve, and its origins are a bit more exciting than its straightforward name would suggest.\u00a0The Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group first spotted the phenomenon last year, reports Gizmodo<\/i>\u2019s\u00a0George Dvorsky<\/a>, and has been collecting photos of Steve sightings.\u00a0The name Steve reflects their confusion about the phenomenon\u2019s origins, Dvorsky writes, and reminded someone of the movie<\/a>\u00a0Over the Hedge<\/em> \u201cin which a character arbitrarily conjures up the name Steve<\/a> to describe an object he\u2019s not sure about.\u201d …<\/p>\n

[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\u00a0an ESA press release<\/a>. The data didn\u2019t show a proton aurora. Instead, it showed something that had never been observed before: a temperature spike of over 5400 degrees Fahrenheit\u00a0in a spot about 186 miles above Earth\u2019s surface combined with a gas ribbon over 15 miles wide that was flowing west more slowly than the other gases that surrounded it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An upcoming paper supposedly will give an explanation – or at least a hypothesis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My lovely Arts Editor directs my attention to Steve … the low Earth orbit phenomenon. From Smithsonian.com: Facebook is a place to share dramas and dog pictures, hit \u201clike\u201d and watch weird events unfold live. But for a group of amateur skywatchers, the social network is also a place to \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9272"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9275,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9272\/revisions\/9275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}