Tiny Matters [BONUS] A hedgehog doppelgänger and STEVE lighting up the sky: Tiny Show and Tell Us #14
Jan 15, 2025
A mysterious sky glow called STEVE and how citizen scientists helped name and study it. The odd family of tenrecs from Madagascar and their surprising resemblances to hedgehogs, opossums, and moles. Convergent evolution examples that show how similar niches produce similar shapes across unrelated animals.
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Steve Is A Different Sky Glow Than Aurora
- Steve is a distinct upper-atmosphere glow caused by a fast-moving hot gas stream called the subauroral ion drift, not by charged-particle auroral excitation.
- It appears as a short-lived mauve or magenta streak visible at lower latitudes during strong solar activity at solar maximum.
Citizen Scientists First Photographed Steve
- Citizen scientists in the Aurora Chasers Facebook group first documented Steve's visual appearance around 2016, prompting scientific study.
- The first formal study published in 2018 was titled New Science in Plain Sight and credited citizen photographers for discovery.
Steve Got Its Name From A Cartoon Hedge
- Canadian Aurora chasers nicknamed the phenomenon Steve after a hedge-naming joke in the animated film Over the Hedge.
- The playful name was later back-formed into the acronym Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.