"Our jaws dropped when we saw the movies for the first time," said space scientist Larry Lyons of the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), a member of the team that made the discovery. "These outbursts are telling us something very fundamental about the nature of auroras." The collisions occur on such a vast scale that isolated observers on Earth -- with limited fields of view -- had never noticed them before. It took a network of sensitive cameras spread across thousands of miles to get the big picture.

Interesting ...