The mysterious 900 light source flashes on the surface of the Earth

NASA's Earth-observation spacecraft detects nearly 900 mysterious lights reflected from the planet's surface in just one year.

The strange phenomenon was first mentioned in the 1990s, when astronomer Carl Sagan recorded light trails in a photograph from the Galileo spacecraft. The new study, published in the journal Nature, shows that light flashes not only appear on the sea but on land. They found that they were more likely to originate from highly floating horizontal ice crystals, according to Phys.org.

EPIC , a multicolored Earth camera from the US Aerospace Agency (NASA) on the Deep Space Meteorological Observatory (DSCOVR), administered by the US National and Atmospheric Administration, found 866. flashes on land during the period from 2015 to August 2016.

Scientists hypothesize that light beams are caused by water in the upper layer in the form of ice crystals.

Light on the ocean may simply be the reflection of sunlight above the smooth surface of the ocean or lake, Alexander Marshak, the DSCOVR project manager, explains. But the flashes on land are different.

EPIC captures separate red, green and blue photos, making light appear to have three colors. If the phenomenon caused by reflected sunlight, the team speculates that they need to focus on special places on Earth , where the angle created by the Sun and Earth is similar to the angle between the spacecraft and the Left. Land. They found two positions that met this condition.

In the study, the scientists hypothesized that the beams of light caused by water in the upper layer were in the form of ice crystals. To find out, they set up reflections and use EPIC to measure the height of clouds. The analysis revealed the position of the upper cloud cloud, 5 - 8km from the ground, where the mysterious light flashes. Reflection angle indicates horizontal ice crystals.

"The source of light flashes is not on the ground , " Marshak said. "It is obviously due to ice, it is more likely that the Sun reflects on horizontal crystals. "

Mysterious lights on the surface of the Earth.