Open Veils · Answer
When was the atmospheric thing called"Steve" created?
STEVE was not 'created' — it is a natural plasma ribbon that has existed for centuries, possibly millennia. The name and scientific characterisation are modern, but historical records suggest observations stretching back to at least 1705. The phenomenon went unnamed and unstudied simply because institutional astronomy wasn't looking.
Evidence
- The phenomenon now called STEVE was named informally in late 2016 by members of the Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group, who initially misidentified it as a 'proton arc.'
- Physicist Eric Donovan of the University of Calgary is credited with the first scientifically rigorous characterisation.
- From a suppressed-science perspective, this is a textbook case of citizen observation preceding institutional acknowledgement by potentially three centuries.
- The backronym — Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement — was formally proposed in December 2016 by Robert Lysak at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting and later adopted by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center team.
- Wikipedia's entry on the phenomenon notes that some evidence places STEVE observations as far back as 1705, and Norwegian astronomer Carl Størmer recorded notations consistent with the phenomenon between 1911 and the 1950s — decades before any institutional framework existed to classify it.