{"id":635182,"date":"2026-04-28T23:50:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T23:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/635182\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T23:50:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T23:50:10","slug":"mysterious-green-lights-over-hawaiian-evening-sky-are-baffling-astronomers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/635182\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious Green Lights Over Hawaiian Evening Sky Are Baffling Astronomers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"green<\/p>\n

The green lights that lit up the skies over Hawaii on the weekend are baffling researchers. Photo: Jake Asuncion\/\/Screenshot<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

On first glance, the footage of dancing green lights captured by Jake Asuncion over the Big Island of Hawaii appear to be the Northern Lights. But the aurora borealis<\/a>, as its also known, isn\u2019t something anyone in Hawaii should expect to see.<\/p>\n

Asuncion, who lives in Kona, captured the strange glowing lights two nights in a row as he was filming the sunset. While they were faint to the naked eye, his camera picked them up in greater detail.<\/p>\n

The glow appeared about 15 minutes after the sun sank beneath the horizon on both nights. While it may look like aurora, a phenomenon generally seen in the skies over higher latitude regions that\u2019s caused by solar wind interacting with Earth\u2019s magnetic field, it\u2019s unlikely that that is truly what the lights were.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt looked very interesting\u2014the green color looks like aurora,\u201d Nick Bradley, a local astronomer with Stargazers of Hawaii, told Khon2 News<\/a>, \u201cbut honestly, we don\u2019t really get that in Hawaii.\u201d<\/p>\n

After reviewing the data from over the weekend, experts concluded that there wasn\u2019t enough geomagnetic storm activity on the nights in question to produce an aurora. While it\u2019s not impossible \u2014 an aurora was seen over Hawaii in 2024 \u2014 it\u2019s extremely unlikely. The index used to track aurora strength was at a level 3-4, while the Hawaii aurora in 2024 was twice that.<\/p>\n

Bradley went on to shoot down a few more theories, too. \u201cSatellites look like small pinpoint lights moving across the sky \u2014 we see them every night. This doesn\u2019t look like that,\u201d he said, before ruling out meteor showers and the \u201cgreen flash\u201d that everyone hopes to see at sunset. Army officials in the area told reporters that they weren\u2019t using any lasers on those nights, either.<\/p>\n

So for now, researchers and viewers alike are confounded. But with any luck, the glow will appear again and give researchers more insight into what\u2019s causing it.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The green lights that lit up the skies over Hawaii on the weekend are baffling researchers. Photo: Jake…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[4943,210928,49,48,237433,266,66,306],"class_list":["post-635182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-aurora-borealis","tag-big-island","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-green-lights","tag-hawaii","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}