Wednesday morning, Dec. 9th, people in arctic Norway were stunned when a gigantic luminous spiral formed in the northern sky. "We are used to seeing lots of auroras here in Norway, but this was different," says Nick Banbury of Harstad who witnessed the phenomenon on his way to work "between 7:50 and 8:00 a.m. local time."
[...] "It consisted initially of a green beam of light similar in color to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end. This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to Earth. According to press reports, this could be seen all over northern Norway and must therefore have been very high up in the atmosphere to be seen hundreds of km apart."
UPDATE (2 a.m. EST, Dec. 10): Circumstantial evidence is mounting that the phenomenon was caused by a malfunctioning suborbital rocket, launched from a Russian submarine in the White Sea. A Navtex no-fly alert was issued for the White Sea on Dec. 9th, and photographers have recorded what appears to be the initial boost phase of a launch beneath the spiral. A rocket motor spinning out of control could indeed explain the spiral pattern [...]. The Russian rocket hypothesis is plausible, but it has not yet been confirmed.
da http://spaceweather.com/
da http://spaceweather.com/
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