Hi Reddit! We discovered “Steve,” a mysterious purple light in the sky related to auroras. We’re space and citizen scientists participating in an initiative called Aurorasaurus and working with NASA. Ask us anything!
Bibliographic record
Abstract
EDIT 4:35 pm ET: Thank you all for your excellent questions. It’s been a lot of fun sharing our science with you. We’re signing off now. We have just published a study detailing “Steve,” an aurora-related dancing purple light first spotted – and named! – by amateur photographers. This new information about Steve comes from analyzing satellite data, all-sky cameras and additional citizen-scientist photographs. Steve’s scientific name is now Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (which can still be shortened to STEVE). STEVE appears as a faint purple ribbon of light in the sky and is often accompanied by a short-lived, green, picket fence structure. It looks much like an aurora but occurs at lower latitudes closer to the equator. After analyzing satellite data, we learned that STEVE is the visible side of something we were already familiar with: sub auroral ion drift (SAID), a fast moving stream of extremely hot particles. SAIDs appear in areas closer to the equator (like southern Canada) than where most auroras appear. Until now, we never knew SAIDs had a visual component! Studying STEVE can help us paint a better picture of how Earth’s magnetic fields function and interact with charged particles in space. You can help us learn more about STEVE by submitting your photographs and sightings of the phenomenon to a citizen science project called Aurorasaurus (online at aurorasaurus.org or on your device as iOS and Android apps). Check here for more details about how to spot STEVE. Answering your questions today are: Liz MacDonald, space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and founder of Aurorasaurus Chris Ratzlaff, citizen scientist who first named Steve; runs the Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group Burcu Kosar, space scientist at NASA Goddard Matt Heavner, space scientist at the New Mexico Consortium, Los Alamos, New Mexico Bea Gallardo-Lacourt, space physicist at the University of Calgary, Canada Bill Archer, space scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada Megan Gillies, space scientist at the University of Calgary, Canada We are now live. @NASASun on Twitter
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.473 | 0.275 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".