Scientists at the University of Southampton have confirmed what they consider to be an unmistakable cause-and-effect relationship between radio emissions and sudden auroral eruptions.

The international team’s findings, called unprecedented by the scientific community, have been published in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers speculate that this will alter the means by which space weather is forecast.

According to published reports, the use of advanced ground-based observatories made it possible for the researchers to detect and identify signature patterns of low-frequency radio wave emissions in the magnetosphere that were immediately succeeded – repeatedly – by auroral explosions.

This discovery provides a missing piece for physicists who, until now, were never certain of the immediate trigger behind the violent energy release that expresses itself as the northern and southern lights.