Amateur sky watchers in Finland have been credited with discovering a new kind of aurora borealis:
A few of the citizens' photos showed a form of aurora that didn't fit into any of the known categories. It had green, horizontal waves running in parallel. Its undulations reminding some observers of sand formations, and it was christened "the dunes."
This previously unknown type of aurora is seen in an area of the upper atmosphere that's something of a mystery, to the point that it's called "the ignorosphere":
It's in the ionosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere containing charged particles. Grandin says the part of the ionosphere where the dunes are found has been studied less than other areas because it's hard to take measurements in this zone.
"Satellites cannot fly at such low altitude, balloons cannot reach that high altitude, even radars generally do not really resolve the measurements at those altitudes." He says the region "is called very often 'the ignorosphere' because we basically ignore almost everything about it."
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