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An image from space revealed mysterious spheres that glow above the Earth

The astronauts photographed “otherworldly” light phenomena in the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists have been able to explain them.

Views of the Earth from orbit are nothing new. However, wonderful phenomena can astonish us in them.

Ghosts of light

A few days ago, the American space agency NASA published on the website of its affiliates Earth Observatory image from the ISS space station showing strange spheres floating in the earth’s atmosphere. They look epic, they are gigantic in size.

As mysterious as they seem, they have a simple explanation. What is surprising, however, is that the two light phenomena have nothing in common. They only occurred at the same time in the same area.

And once again the same image of the ISS with the description of the area it captures. | source: Credit-NASA / Earth Observatory

First ballooncaptured in an ISS image over the South China Sea last October 30, which can be seen at the bottom of the image, it is the result of a powerful lightning bolt in the Gulf of Thailand.

Lightning strikes are rarely visible from orbit, usually obscured by clouds. This time, however, the lightning struck in a large circular gap at the top of the clouds. Therefore, he illuminated the surrounding walls of the caldera (cauldron-shaped formation) and created a striking patch of light.


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A close-up of a blue sphere that was the result of lightning lighting up a cloud in the Gulf of Thailand. | source: Credit-NASA / Earth Observatory

Second ballyou see in the upper right corner of the photo, somewhere in the North Pacific, it is caused by the distorted light reflected from the moon.

The orientation of Earth’s natural satellite relative to the ISS causes light reflected from the Sun to pass directly through the planet’s atmosphere. At the same time, the mood transforms it into a bright blue spot with a blurry hall effect that looks like a glowing ball.

The effect is caused by the fact that some of the moon’s light is scattered by small particles, such as water droplets or ice crystals, in the Earth’s atmosphere.

A why are both balls blue? Different colors of visible light have different wavelengths, which affect how they interact with atmospheric particles. Blue light has the shortest wavelength, so it disperses easily. And that’s why the moonlight turned blue in the photo.

Blue is good, it dissipates

The same phenomenon explains why the sky appears blue during the day: the blue wavelengths of sunlight are more dispersed and therefore become more visible to the human eye.

The photo also shows a glowing network of lights from cities. Most of the light pollution comes from Thailand. Its other sources are found in Vietnam and in the southernmost regions of China, where, however, they are partly covered by clouds.

The orange halo that mimics the curvature of the Earth is the edge of the atmosphere, which is called the “edge of the Earth”.

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