Strange Skies
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Gigantic jets and upper atmospheric phenomena

Ross Pomeroy
Real Clear Science
Tue, 08 Jan 2019 01:02 UTC
Gigantic Jet
© NASA
We're all well acquainted with lightning. The bright, brief flashes of electrical energy puncture the general monotony of Earth's sky. Their luminous dance, however, is restricted to within and below the planet's billowing thunderclouds. Often shielded from our view above is a light show of a more magnificent nature. Here can be seen transient bursts of luminous plasma, the most common of which is a sprite, resembling a red mushroom cloud between 50 and 100 kilometers above the surface. Lucky onlookers can also see blue jets, bold, yet wispy blue bolts extending upwards from the tops of clouds to as high as 40 to 50 kilometers.

Rarest of all the "lightning above the clouds" is the gigantic jet, which is like a supersized blue jet that transitions to the color red at the highest altitudes. Scientists at the Arecibo Observatory once observed a blue jet extending from a thundercloud up to 70 kilometers, blazing at speeds of roughly 2,000,000 meters per second, more than forty times faster than ground lightning!

What sparks these bright behemoths? This was the topic of a recent study published to Scientific Reports. Researchers from the Florida Institute of Technology and the University of New Hampshire made use of different radar variables, lightning data, and lightning simulations to theorize what exactly goes on within a thundercloud.
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Rainbow

'Sun dogs,' upside-down rainbows spotted in southwestern Ontario, Canada


CBC News
Mon, 07 Jan 2019 12:00 UTC
CZ over SW, ON, CA
© Christy Litster
Windsor-Essex saw a couple of odd-looking weather phenomena over the weekend.

Photos of upside down rainbows and what seems like multiple suns came into our newsroom inbox from our audience.

"You need very specific weather conditions up high in the sky to see those," said Marie-Ève Giguère, a meteorologist with Environment Canada. "You need no wind at all, or very little wind."

Commonly called sun dogs - where you see almost mini-suns on either side of the real sun - the technical term is parhelion. The spots on either side of the sun can be reddish but are most often white.
Sun dog over SW, ON, CA
© Andy Brescuk
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Sun

'Sun dog' phenomenon captured across metro Detroit, Michigan

Kevin Jeaves
WXYZ
Mon, 07 Jan 2019 14:54 UTC
Sun dogs over Detroit, MI
© WXYZ
Something unusual in the sky caught the eyes of many across metro Detroit Sunday afternoon.

Our viewers were sending in photos of an atmospheric phenomena asking, "what is this?" or referring to them as "little rainbows".

What you see in the photos are called "sun dogs". One to the left of the sun, and one to the right of the sun. The phenomenon occurs when sun light hits ice crystals high up in the atmosphere. That light is refracted through the crystals, and what we see is the scattering of the light. Usually sun dogs are accompanied by a 22° halo around the sun, which is also a refraction of light through ice crystals. These are common ahead of warm fronts, as high-level clouds slowly move in at high altitudes.
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Info

Six supernovae and three planets discovered by TESS

Monica Young
Sky&Telescope
Mon, 07 Jan 2019 02:47 UTC
New Planets
© NASA / MIT / TESSNASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has found three confirmed exoplanets in the data from the space telescope’s four cameras.
Launched in April 2018, TESS began science operations in July last year, surveying the sky from a "lunar resonant orbit," and has now completed observations of six sectors, each monitored for 27 days at a time. By the time the mission is done, TESS's wide-field cameras will have covered the whole sky in search of transiting exoplanets around 200,000 of the nearest (and brightest) stars.

The finds presented at the AAS meeting, which use only the first three months of observations, show that TESS is on track to discover several thousand exoplanets. Hundreds of astronomers are involved in the ground-based efforts that will follow up on, confirm, and characterize these planets. But details on the hundreds of candidates were sparse; the first catalog paper is still forthcoming.

More details were available for the confirmed planets:
  • Pi Mensae c, previously reported here, is an oddball of a super-Earth. About twice Earth's size and five times Earth's mass, the planet circles its Sun-like star in six days. What makes that odd is that its previously discovered sibling, Pi Mensae b, is a gas giant ten times Jupiter's mass in a highly elongated, six-year orbit. How two planets on such different trajectories formed in a single system remains an open question.
  • LHS 3844 b is a hot, slightly more than Earth-size planet that circles its red dwarf star in just 11 hours. As with the Pi Mensae planets, the formation of LHS 3844 b is a mystery. Fortunately, the system is only 49 light-years away, making it ideal for future studies.
  • HD 21749 b, the newest discovery, is a sub-Neptune that's three times Earth's size but 23 times its mass. It's denser than Neptune, but not so much that it's rocky. Astronomers suspect it has a thick, heavy atmosphere. The planet is on a 36-day orbit, with additional transit data made available by the HARPS team.
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Comet 2

Oumuamua data reveals intriguing possibilities

sschirott
The Thunderbolts Project
Sat, 05 Jan 2019 05:38 UTC
Oumuamua
© M. Kornmesser/European Southern Observatory
Today, physicist Eugene Bagashov concludes his remarkable three-part analysis of Oumuamua, the mysterious object which is thought to be our solar system's first interstellar traveler. In previous episodes, Eugene has explored several enigmas, including the puzzle of the object's mysterious acceleration as it moved away from the Sun. While this episode was in production, Eugene made a stunning discovery that may provide an essential pathway to understanding Oumuamua's trajectory. As Eugene explains, this discovery relates directly to measurements of the interstellar magnetic field.
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Info

Greenland Crater - The 12,000 year old comet that erased ancient civilization

Jimmy
YouTube
Tue, 11 Dec 2018 06:12 UTC
Ancient Impact
© ScreenCapture/YouTube
NASA recently discovered of a massive, 19-mile (31km) wide crater, found hidden underneath Greenland's Hiawatha Glacier. This crater is the result of an asteroid impact, from a nearly 1 mile-wide mountain of iron, weighing somewhere around, get this, 11-12 BILLION tons, and was traveling at approximately 12 MILES per second - which is equivalent to more than 43,000 miles per hour - when it slammed into the earth some 12,000 years ago - And...with the mind-boggling force of essentially a 700-megaton bomb. And without a doubt, THIS is the reason why there is so much mystery and why we know so little about lost Ancient human civilization
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Igloo

Severe winter weather forecast for parts of US and Europe as the polar vortex splits into 3 pieces

Andrew Freedman
Axios Science
Thu, 03 Jan 2019 10:43 UTC
Polar Vortex
© GFS model via Judah Cohen/AER VeriskComputer model projected 10 mb geopotential heights (dam; contours) across the Northern Hemisphere for Jan. 2 through Jan. 18.
Scientists are seeing signs that global weather patterns toward the latter half of January and into February may shift significantly to usher in severe winter weather for parts of the U.S. and Europe.

How it works: The possible changes are being triggered by a sudden and drastic warming of the air in the stratosphere, some 100,000 feet above the Arctic, and by a resulting disruption of the polar vortex - an area of low pressure at high altitudes near the pole that, when disrupted, can wobble like a spinning top and send cold air to the south. In this case, it could split into three pieces, and those pieces would determine who gets hit the hardest.

The big picture: Studies show that what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic, and rapid Arctic warming may paradoxically be leading to more frequent cold weather outbreaks in Europe, Asia and North America, particularly later in the winter.

During the past 2 weeks, a sudden stratospheric warming event has taken place, showing up first in the Siberian Arctic, and then spreading over the North Pole.
  • Such events occur when large atmospheric waves surge beyond the troposphere and into the layer of air above it. Such a vertical transport of energy can rapidly warm the stratosphere, and set in motion a chain reaction that disrupts the stratospheric polar vortex.
  • Sudden stratospheric warming events are known to affect the weather in the U.S. and Europe on a time delay - typically on the order of a week to several weeks later, and their effects may persist for more than a month.
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Sun

Sun pillars and sun dogs seen in southeastern Manitoba, Canada

Connor Gerbrandt
Steinbach Online
Sat, 28 Dec 2019 22:09 UTC
Sun pillar over Manitoba, Canada
© Steinbach Online
Many people in Steinbach have noticed some unusual light phenomena in the skies over the past couple of days in the form of sun dogs and sun pillars.

Local meteorologist Scott Kehler explains that sun pillars are a vertical beam of light moving away from the sun while sun dogs are little arcs that appear on either side of the sun. Despite their difference in appearance, Kehler says these events are connected.

"They both tend to be related to ice crystals in the air, though the way they are produced is a little bit different. From my recollection, sun pillars occur when the sun is lower in the sky and the sun dogs happen when it is higher in the sky."

Kehler indicates that the conditions for either of these phenomena to occur are quite specific. "Something a lot of people don't realize is that liquid water can actually exist in the atmosphere up to minus 40." This means that ice crystals only really begin to form in significantly colder weather.
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Rainbow

Alabama photographer captures 'upside-down rainbow'

Tom Smith
Times Daily
Mon, 30 Dec 2019 18:41 UTC
Circumhorizontal arc over AL
© Johnny Raper
Johnny Raper was spending Wednesday afternoon at the Rockpile Recreation area near Wilson Dam in hopes of photographing bald eagles that sometimes visit there.

He got the photo of the bald eagles, but he also got a picture of something he had never seen before - a circumhorizon arc or as Raper calls it "an upside-down rainbow."

"I had been watching a juvenile eagle up in a tree waiting and watching for it to fly to get a photo," said Raper, of Florence. "I turned around to watch a pelican in the river and when I turned back to look at the eagle, there was this cloud with all these colors.

"I had never seen anything like it before, and I grabbed my camera and started trying to take photos. It was there maybe five minutes, I got three photos and it was gone," Raper said. "It was amazing. So glad I got to see it and got a photo."

According to Andy Kula, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Huntsville, a circumhorizontal arc is an "optical phenomenon" cause by ice crystals in the clouds.
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Cloud Grey

Spectacular mammatus clouds form over Sydney


SBS
Wed, 02 Jan 2019 16:38 UTC
Dramatic backlit mammatus clouds over Sydney.
© Jemma Wlasichuck, FacebookDramatic backlit mammatus clouds over Sydney.
An unusual cloud formation has covered skies in parts of Sydney as NSW was again hit by wild weather.

Social media has lit up after an unusual cloud formation was seen around Sydney on Wednesday.

Known as mammatus clouds, the formation is most often associated with thunderstorms.

"Never seen anything like it," one Twitter user wrote.

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