The Phenomenon Of Blue Light Shining Into The Sky, Says The European Space Agency

Blue Jet (European Space Agency)

JAKARTA - The European space agency caught the phenomenon of blue light shining towards the sky. The European Space Agency (ESA) posted the incident on the official Instagram page @europeanspaceagency.

At first, the video features a number of lightning bolts under the clouds. Not long after that, a blue light suddenly appeared, emitting from below and then extending into the sky for a few seconds before finally vanishing.

ESA refers this phenomenon as the blue jet, which is a lightning strike from a storm cloud. This natural occurrence cannot be seen from land. ESA uses a storm tracking device called the European Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) via the ISS space station.

ASIM consists of a group of optical cameras, photometers, X-ray detectors and gamma rays that are placed on a space station module.

Launching Live Science, this blue jet phenomenon occurs in the sky of the Naru Islands, Oceania, the Pacific Ocean. The researchers claim that they saw five flashes of blue light that lasted only about 10 to 20 milliseconds.

The other four flashes of light were accompanied by tiny flashes of ultraviolet light, resembling a rapidly expanding ring. This phenomenon is a result of the interaction of electrons, radio waves, and the atmosphere or better known by researchers as Elves (Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources).

Elves are light emissions that appear randomly to form rings that expand in the ionosphere, a layer of charged particles that stretches from 60 to 1,000 km above the earth's surface, as quoted from LiveScience.

The researchers revealed that these findings could help them determine the lightning coming from the clouds and the effect of the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"This paper is an impressive highlight of the many new phenomena that ASIM has observed above thunderstorms and shows that we still have a lot to discover and learn about our universe," said Astrid Orr, physics coordinator at ESA as quoted from the website. ESA official.