We just got our finest views yet of the eerie alien aurora on Mars.The United Arab Emirates Hope orbiter, which reached the red planet earlier this year, utilized its ultraviolet spectrometer to capture radiant structures of radiant atomic oxygen high up in the Martian night sky.
” The full set of information collected during these observations include far and severe ultraviolet auroral emissions which have never ever been imaged in the past at Mars,” the UAE Space Agency composed in an update to the Hope website.The Martian aurora is both like and unlike the aurora seen here on Earth. The resulting ionization triggers the oxygen to glow.On Earth, these ionized particles travel along our planets magnetic field lines towards the poles, which is why auroras tend to take place at higher latitudes.But Marss international magnetic field decayed relatively early on in the worlds history, leaving behind only spots of magnetism maintained in allured minerals in the crust, which suggests the auroral circulation is rather different.” The beacons of light that stand out versus the dark nightside disk are extremely structured discrete aurora, which traces out where energetic particles excite the atmosphere after being funneled down by a patchy network of crustal magnetic fields that originate from minerals on the surface area of Mars,” the UAE Space Agency explained.