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Earth’s rings ‘are made of electricity–a donut-shaped circuit carrying millions of amps around our planet.’ But proton auroras are ‘still mysterious’.

May 15, 2023: Europeans are still trying to wrap their minds around what happened after sunset on April 23, 2023. Everyone knew that a CME was coming; photographers were already outside waiting for auroras. But when the auroras appeared, they were very strange.

“I had never seen anything quite like it,” says Heiko Ulbricht of Saxony, Germany. “The auroras began to tear themselves apart, pulsating as they formed individual blobs that floated high in the sky.”

“It literally took my breath away,” he says. “My pulse was still racing hours later!” The same blobs were sighted in France and Poland, and in Denmark they were caught flashing like a disco strobe light.

Ordinary auroras don’t act like this.

Indeed, “these were not ordinary auroras,” confirms space physicist Toshi Nishimura of Boston University. “They are called ‘proton auroras,’ and they come from Earth’s ring current system.”

Most people don’t…