Earliest documented aurora found in ancient Chinese text
By Laura Geggel published about 5 hours ago
It's about 300 years older than the previous record holder.
The northern lights over Greenland. The oldest documented observation of an aurora may date to the early 10th century B.C. (Image credit: Elena Pueyo via Getty Images)
The earliest documented case of an aurora, the fleeting but brilliantly colored lights that sometimes illuminate the night sky, dates to the early 10th century B.C., a new study on an ancient Chinese text reveals.
The text describes "five-colored light" witnessed in the northern part of the night sky toward the end of the reign of King Zhāo, the fourth king of the Chinese Zhou dynasty. The exact dates of Zhāo's reign aren't known, but it's likely that this "five-colored light" event happened in either 977 B.C. or 957 B.C., according to the study.
Researchers discovered this colorful detail in the Bamboo Annals (Zhúshū Jìnián in Mandarin), a fourth-century B.C. text written on bamboo slips that chronicled legendary and early Chinese history. Although scholars have been aware of the Bamboo Annals for some time, a fresh look at this particular section led to the realization that it detailed what might be the earliest described aurora, 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 in the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the U.K., told Live Science.
Mid-latitude auroras can present multiple colors when they are bright enough, which could explain why the celestial event was noted as "five-colored light," the researchers added. For example, in October 1847, a colorful auroral display was observed in the United Kingdom, Hayakawa told Live Science. According to a report near Cambridge, England, "a crown was formed near the magnetic zenith, from which all the rays appeared to diverge; their colours were most splendid and of peculiar transparency, especially the red and green, the former being quite like carmine, and the latter that of the pale emerald; the central part of this canopy, or that near the magnetic North, was of a very yellow colour, one streamer being quite like gold."
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