A mysterious sun pillar was seen in Volyn: scientists explained what it was. Photo

Recently, a mysterious glow was spotted near the village of Svityaz in Volyn - it looked like a pillar of light coming down from heaven to earth. Eyewitnesses managed to capture the unusual natural phenomenon on camera.

There were many hypotheses about the origin of the amazing solar column. The local edition of Konkurent asked experts to comment on the cause of the glow.

Petro Trokhymchuk, an associate professor of the Department of Theoretical and Computer Physics at Volyn National University and a lecturer in astrophysics, explained that, in his opinion, the cause was the turbulence (heterogeneity) of the atmosphere. There were a lot of disordered clouds in the sky at that moment, so there was a scattering of light at the time of sunset.

The phenomenon is relatively rare, although it is not unusual from the point of view of science. This was emphasized by Anatolii Vasylenko, a researcher at the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

The expert explained the cause of the solar column. In fact, it is a vertical column of light that usually stretches upward or, less often, downward from the Sun. Such phenomena can be seen at dawn or at sunset.

"Sunlight is reflected from the surfaces of "tile-like" hexagonal (hexagonal) ice crystals, which sway from side to side and fall down in the atmosphere," Vasylenko said.

And these crystals are associated with clouds at high altitude. It must be a thin type of cloud, such as cirrus clouds.

Visually, the witnesses saw a pillar, but in fact, the phenomenon is not related to vertical rays as such. The column is formed by a combination of glare from millions of ice crystals.

The color of such pillars can be different - it all depends on the weather conditions, the sun and clouds. There have been cases when the glow was yellow or red, but it can also be white or even purple.

After sunset, the pillars visually lengthen and begin to brighten. And depending on the location of the crystals in the clouds, the phenomena can look like spots of light that seem to be vertically strung together.

The employee of the Main Astronomical Observatory added that there are two terms: sun pillars and light pillars. We can see the latter almost every day - they arise from street lamps, but the physics of their appearance is similar - it is simply light reflected from flat ice crystals in the atmosphere.

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