Naturalist photographer Walter Binotto has posted an image of a glowing red disk in the sky. He spotted it while he was in the northern Italian city of Possagno on March 27.
For a long time, no one could understand what this glow is and how it was formed. It seems some eyewitnesses even believed it was a UFO. Nevertheless, there is no mysticism in this mysterious phenomenon.
According to scientists, the Italians saw the so-called "elf" (from the English ELVES, or Emission of Light and Very Low-Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources). This is a rare type of stratospheric or mesosphere disturbance resulting from intense electrification during a thunderstorm.
Map of Italy with the location of "elves" marked. Photo: Valter Binotto
The disc-shaped regions are formed when electromagnetic pulses emitted by a lightning strike the Earth's ionosphere and affect its upper atmosphere. They are usually found between 80 and 644 km above the ground and can be hundreds of kilometers in diameter.
As a rule, "elves" are visible only to satellites orbiting the Earth. According to experts, the new image is probably the best picture of this phenomenon ever taken from the surface of our planet.
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