Earliest documented aurora found in ancient Chinese text
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 ...
Nowadays, the northern lights, the aurora borealis, occur at northern latitudes, while the southern lights, or aurora australis, happen at southern latitudes. But during the mid-10th century B.C., Earth's north magnetic pole inclined toward the Eurasian continents, at about 15 degrees closer to central China than it does today. As a result, it's possible that ancient people in central China — possibly as far south as 40 degrees latitude, or just north of Beijing — could have seen geomagnetic storms and the colorful lights they produced ...
Previously, the oldest candidate auroras were records inscribed by Assyrian astronomers on cuneiform tablets, which dated to between 679 B.C. and 655 B.C. ...
The latest finding took so long to be recognized for several reasons ... The original manuscript of the Bamboo Annals was lost, rediscovered in the third century A.D. and then lost again during the Song dynasty (A.D. 960 to 1276). During the 16th century, a translation used the word "comet" rather than "five-colored light." Now, the new study sets the record straight ...
