Orange with 6 media, Posted on Friday, June 02, 2023 at 3:10 pm.
On Monday, May 29, in Hem (Nord), a teenager saw a partial circular arc in the sky, an extremely rare meteorological phenomenon, La Voix du Nord reported.
The young man’s mother shared supportive photos of her son’s discovery. “My son Amin, 12, noticed a circular in Hem yesterday“, he wrote to our colleagues via Facebook Voice of the North In their section “The voice answers you“.
According to Florent Delefly, a researcher at the Institute of Celestial Mechanics and Ephemeris Calculations, this bow “Very partial only“, thus confirming the first hypothesis presented by the teenager’s mother.
A principle similar to the formation of rainbows
Trivially, this rare weather phenomenon has the appearance of an upside-down rainbow. In Europe, only thirteen appear per year. In more scientific terms, this “circumcendental arc” is an aura (a phenomenon seen in the atmosphere). This occurs when the sun’s rays refract flat ice crystals in high clouds. “The theory is like the principle that makes it possible to create curves the sky“, summarizes Florent Deleflie.
In more detail: “UA series of reflections and refractions of sunlight, it is broken down into the many colors that make up the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum (from red to blue). (…) These ice crystals, in their movement, depend on the same positions and then form a large prism network.But the halo diminishes as the sun sets, notes the researcher.
