STEVE and the Citizen Scientists: Night-watching Enthusiasts Identify a New Type of Aurora
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public participation in research has yielded unanticipated discoveries in many fields, but probably no recent discovery in astronomy and physics owes more to such citizen scientists than the identification of the one-of-a-kind aurora known as STEVE. A display of purple and green lights running east to west, STEVE appears relatively high up in the nighttime sky, for about an hour at a time. People who've been able to photograph it, from locations as far-flung as Tasmania, Michigan, and Scotland, and especially those in the area around Calgary, Alberta, report that the purple part of the aurora resembles a ribbon, with the green part appearing in a series of lines like a picket fencean unforgettable sight.The visible structure of STEVE has been documented by the aurora- chasing public for a long time, but only in the past few years have researchers started to identify the physical processes underlying this unusual sight. It seems that STEVE's visible light occurs along with a subauroral ion drift (SAID), a strong westward flow of charged particles that's still not completely understood.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".