Aurora Secrets May be Revealed with Social Networking Tools

There may be new ways to track down the Northern Lights-and learn a bit more about them. New research has used tools designed to study social networks to gain significant new insights into the aurora.

The researchers actually used data from over 100 individual magnetometers located at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere. These magnetometers have been used for decades to  track space weather, but it is only recently that the data from all these devices has been collected in one place-something called the SuperMAG project.

"The new SuperMAG data collection opened up the possibility of finding patterns of correlation between each pair of all of the magnetometers, and studying how this changes in time," said Sandra Chapman, one of the lead researchers, in a news release. "We found ways of overcoming the challenges of the irregular distribution of the magnetometers and the different conditions at each site but what we were most excited about was our idea of trying to apply techniques normally used to study social networks of people to this network of magnetometers."

So what did they find? The analysis shows what can be done when data from different international observatories are brought together in one place. What's truly interesting, though, is that researchers can now perform analyses to see the detailed patterns in space weather maps.

"This analysis showed very few connections in the network before the onset of substorms that lead to auroras such as the Northern Lights," said Jesper W. Gjerloev, one of the researchers. "The network exhibited a clear increase in connectivity at the onset of substorms with high-latitude connections predominating though there were also low and cross latitudinal connections present. As the ionosphere recovered from the substorms there is a switch from a high-latitude-dominated connection structure to a low-latitude-dominated one."

The findings reveal a bit more about the aurora, and show that this type of social networking is key when it comes to learning a bit more about the phenomenon and space weather in general.

The findings are published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

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