NASA's Perseverance rover has captured the first-ever photo of "naked eye" auroras on Mars. The alien light show — snapped after the Red Planet was battered by a powerful solar storm last year — is not as visually stunning as Earthly auroras, but it's arguably even more impressive.
The wandering robot snapped the newly released image on March 18, 2024, roughly three days after a sizable cloud of charged particles, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), erupted from the sun. In a new study, published May 14 in the journal Science Advances, researchers revealed that the CME collided with Mars' patchy magnetic field, exciting the gas within the planet's wispy atmosphere to emit light, similar to how the most vibrant northern lights displays are created on Earth.
