EARLIEST AURORA DOCUMENTED IN ANCIENT CHINESE TEXT
It’s about 300 years older than the previous record holder
Reported by Laura Geggel
Aurorae glow different colours because the solar particles interact with different gases at different heights in Earth’s atmosphere
The earliest documented case of an aurora dates to the early 10th century BCE. Ancient Chinese text describes ‘five-coloured light’ witnessed in the northern part of the night sky towards the end of the reign of King Zhao, the fourth king of the Chinese Zhou dynasty. The exact dates of Zhao’s reign aren’t known, but it’s likely that this event happened in either 977 or 957 BCE. Researchers discovered this colourful detail in the Bamboo Annals, a 4th-century BCE text written on bamboo slips that chronicled legendary and early Chinese history. Though scholars have been aware of the Bamboo Annals for some time, a fresh look at this particular section led to the realisation that it detailed what might be the earliest described aurorae, said study corresponding author Hisashi Hayakawa, an assistant professor at the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research at Nagoya University in Japan and a visiting scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK.