if you’ve had the opportunity to see the
Northern Lights or the aurora the aurora
borealis or the aurora australis and
some quiet you know nate natural
environment natural setting i think
you’d agree with me that this is truly
one of nature’s most profoundly
beautiful serene and emotionally
evocative phenomena I like to say that
the first time I saw the aurora in a
place like this changed something inside
of me and change something about the way
that I look at the world I’m a physicist
and I study the aurora and today I’m
here to share a story with you and I
call that story how I met Steve and
that’ll make sense about halfway through
this talk but first what I’m gonna do is
just talk a little bit about what I do
in my job my research team and I build
and deploy cameras all across camera
that capture images of the night sky
over and over and over again night after
night day after day year after year all
the way across Canada and we use that I
like to say to study the Aurora but what
I’m really doing is actually taking that
information from the images and using
that to remote sense some things that
are going on a little further out in
space in a region we call the
magnetosphere it is not otherwise
invisible to us and so in a very real
sense for me it’s not my cameras but
it’s actually the Aurora that is my
scientific instrument I worked with NASA
I work with the European and Canadian
Space Agency’s I’ve worked with the
Chinese Academy of Sciences hundreds of
researchers around the world use my data
together with data from a constellation
of scientific satellites in the Earth’s
magnetosphere that’s worth billions of
dollars I could stand here and make that
sound exciting okay but that would be
disingenuous because when I do that
invariably I’m trading on the cool
factor of space right and it’s not
really true to how I spend my time
because what I am
is a scientist and I sit and look at my
data and do things that are you know on
a day to day basis unless you’re
interested in something like how pitch
angle diffusion of 10 kilo electron volt
electrons by lora band chorus near the
inner edge of the plasma sheet causes
patchy pulsating aurora unless you’re
interested in that what I do is not very
interesting and I guarantee you that I’m
the only person in the room who cares
about that okay so I hope you’ll
understand I’m not going to talk per se
about what I do but rather I’m going to
share with you something that has
happened to me over the last couple of
years that has changed my relationship
with how I do my work and also has
brought a lot of joy to myself and to
many people that I’ve now come to
interact with on a fairly regular basis
okay now what I am is an observer of
nature an observer of the night sky for
the last 20 years I’ve been building a
system which does what I described
earlier 20 years ago in 1997 we had one
camera operating at Gillam Manitoba
it took one image every 20 seconds every
sorry one image every minute and it
wasn’t a very good image now we have
more than 50 imagers operating from
coast to coast across Canada taking
dozens and dozens of images a minute and
they’re much better images than they
used to be 20 years ago we used to
struggle moving megabytes of information
around and now we’re struggling using
and now we routinely and easily move
terabytes of information around we used
to wait months to get our data back from
the field now we get our data back from
the field in real time because of the
information technology explosion that
we’re living in I you know we can do
things now that we wouldn’t have dreamed
possible just 20 years ago and it’s been
wonderful now but really no matter the
fact that this is bigger and better and
faster and more impressive than we’re
doing before conceptually it’s no
different
we’re just scientists professional
scientists who are collecting data and
looking at problems that we know are
already there and so
what I want to do now is go into the
story of how I met Steve and so back in
2016
early 2016 a friend of mine named Liz
McDonald came to the University of
Calgary Department of astronomy and
physics to give a colloquium a talk Liz
runs what’s called a citizen science
program for the US National Science
Foundation and that program connects
professional auroral scientists with
people who are auroral enthusiasts out
in the public it connects people who
take pictures with scientists they troll
Twitter looking for instance where
people are saying there they’re seeing
the aurora right now and they make
real-time maps of where the aurora
probably is based on that it’s a really
cool project and it’s and it’s it’s
called aurora Saurus and i would
recommend to people if you’re interested
in it take a look at it okay yeah we’re
a small Department of Physics at the
University of Calgary and our Friday
afternoon colloquia do not draw crowds
like this that will tell you normally I
go into the room and there might be 15
people there for such a talk I don’t
know every one of them and they’ll have
their computers open and that’ll be how
it looks I went in for Liz’s talk and
the room was packed and not only that I
knew almost nobody there and so I turned
to Liz and I said well what’s going on
here who are these people well it turns
out they were from a group a Facebook
group called the Alberta Aurora chasers
this is a group of night-sky photography
enthusiasts who’d like to drive around
the countryside at night and take
pictures of the Aurora this is their
Facebook page they have 15,000 members
now it’s a very popular group and it’s a
very interesting group to interact with
and for them liz is a bit of a rockstar
literally she’s a rocket scientist
literally she works for NASA and she
studies the aurora for a living okay and
and so this is why they were there
after Liz’s colloquium the Aurora
chasers Liz myself went over to a bar
near campus and got into a good
discussion over some beer and they
started showing me their photographs of
the Aurora and there are photographs
like this and what I quickly came to
realize was that these people I was
interacting with were some of the best
Aurora photographers in the world
these are professional quality amateur
photographers who have a passion for
this and during our conversation one of
the chasers a guy named Neil Zeller
said this casually I took a picture of
the proton Ark last night and I said
well no he didn’t and he said yeah I did
I said no he didn’t he said yeah I did
and it’s what and so I said well okay
why don’t you show me what you took a
picture of because for me the proton
Aurora I knew he didn’t do that because
because it’s always sub visual it’s
always too dim to be seen so he wouldn’t
even know to take a picture of her you
know opened up his computer and showed
me an image like this of this little
purple streak across the sky I didn’t
know what it was knew it wasn’t the
proton Aurora it’s very beautiful and
when he told me where and when he had
taken the image for reasons that I won’t
get into here I knew this was
fundamentally different than any
phenomena I had ever seen before in the
night sky and so I said you know that
there’s this there’s this ethos that we
have in science which is that if you’re
going to use a physical mechanism to
describe something in a name then that
physical mechanism should have something
to do with that phenomena and so for me
you know this is not proton Aurora so I
said please don’t call it the proton
Aurora and so and so you know they
agreed they’re smart strong group of
people and they agreed and then a week
later one of them Chris ratzlaf
posted on the page why don’t we call it
Steve and the reason why he suggested we
call it Steve house it has to do with
the children’s movie called over the
hedge where these animals wake up after
hibernating find a hedge they’re scared
of it they don’t know what it is but if
they call it Steve it’s a little bit
less scary okay so not that this thing
is particularly scary all right so Oh
this name caught on and over the next
few months I started to see on the
Alberta chasers Facebook page comments
like Steve was high in the sky over
Alberta last night here’s a picture of
Steve over lack days our here’s a
picture of Steve from Chester Muir and
so on but I still didn’t know what Steve
was and neither did Liz and I would have
certain nobody on the planet did
actually and so I have my data and if I
could figure out what Steve looked like
in my data which is decidedly less
beautiful than their photographs let me
tell you but if I could find it in
then I could actually bring a whole
bunch of other quantitative things to
bear on figuring out what this is and so
a group of us got together and combed
over my data and we found this signature
in it this ethereal luminous feature
that we thought was promising we didn’t
know if it was Steve but we had a plan
and that was we would wait find the
signature in my data some night and see
if some Alberta chaser took a picture of
it and we waited and less than four
weeks later we got this signature from a
camera that we operated in a place
called lucky Lake Saskatchewan and and
you know and and I went onto facebook
and did something I never thought I
would do as part of my professional life
which was I typed in did anybody see
Steve last night okay and five minutes
later a woman named song Lauria from
Vimy Alberta who was taking a photo took
a photograph at exactly the time we were
imaging Steve not too far away sent and
she messaged me this image and we knew
this was Steve and then everything fell
into place in literally just a matter of
hours for us the European Space Agency
has a set of satellites that carry
instruments from the University of
Calgary the taught that look at property
to do with the via the charged particles
in the upper atmosphere one of those
three satellites flew through Steve
right during the time we were imaging it
and we found out from that that Steve is
in fact not probably not Aurora it
corresponds to a little river of very
very fast-moving gas it’s moving at
seven kilometers per second from east to
west and it extends all the way from
Hudson Bay in this instance all the way
over to Alaska if you were to look at
this from space it would look like you
and somebody had reached in with a
purple felt pen and drawn a little line
on the globe thousands of kilometers
from east to west and what’s more the
gas in that region is extremely hot the
swarm instrument told us it was about
six thousand degrees Kelvin or Celsius
which would make it probably the hottest
place on earth at that time and I
imagine the headline for me which would
be astonished scientist astonished that
calorie scientist finds hottest place on
earth over lucky Lake Saskatchewan and
that did not come though
okay all right so so what we’ve done is
we’ve gone very quickly from not knowing
this phenomenon existed in the
scientific community to knowing this
phenomena existed and then finding out
what it was and this was a revolution in
from my perspective this represents the
fact that we are in a fundamentally new
era and the era is it’s enabled by this
information technology explosion but the
new thing and the fundamentally
different thing is the social media
connection between these truly
phenomenally talented amateur Watchers
of nature and scientists who tend to
focus on things that we already know is
there and so as we go forward I’m really
excited that the prospect that we can
get together with these amateurs in this
way and come across discoveries maybe at
a faster pace and and so it’s you know
and and and also I would say that I was
finished with saying that a lot of
people have told me that they think that
the use of the word Steve for this is
somewhat undignified okay
and I will I will say that my answer to
that is that it’s funny okay but more
than that we you know if you if you
think about physics for instance using
whimsical names for things is not
unprecedented because in particle
physics they talk about charm and color
and cork and so on and you know and
these are meant to be meaningless words
because they describe things that we
didn’t understand when they were first
identified but he also have this concept
of a thing called a backronym and I’ll
finish with a comment that at my at the
last American Geophysical Union meeting
in December in San Francisco I gave a
talk on this and I said during it it’d
be really cool if we could find two
words that would make Steve an acronym
right that would mean something
meaningful and I got through to the end
of my talk and a friend of mine and the
question and answer period stood up and
he said Bob Bob life sacked from the
University of Minnesota and I thought he
had a question but he stood up and he
said sudden thermal emission velocity
enhancement which actually is a perfect
backronym for what Steve is and if we’re
right about this that’s what this thing
will go down on the literature ass and
so thank you [Applause]