i know this sounds painfully stupid— but my native language isn’t english. when i looked up how they happen, i got a bunch of big words thrown at me and didn’t understand a single thing.
so, in light of recent events, how the hell does it happen? what causes this phenomenon????? surely there’s a less intense way of explaining it.
In: Planetary Science
In space, the Sun’s mood is quite solar,
It blasts out a wind that’s a roller.
These particles dash
With a magnetic clash,
And dance in the sky by the polar.
The Sun’s wind blows past Earth, getting caught in the magnetic field and burning up upon entry into the atmosphere, where it’s weakest around the poles.
The Sun is constantly spitting out energy and radioactive particles. That’s how it makes light for us to see.
Here on the ground, the really strong particles can’t make it down here, because the Earth is (more or less) a giant magnet. That magnetic field pulls the strong particles away from us, toward the north and south poles.
Up very very high in the atmosphere, those strong particles get bunched up near the north and south pole. Because they are strong particles, they have lots of energy inside them. When they get bunched up, they give some of that energy to the gas of the upper atmosphere. But the gas can’t hold that energy very well, so it releases the energy again, this time as light. Different gases glow in different colors, oxygen is usually greenish-yellow, nitrogen is usually blue. The strong particles make the “sheets” of light because of the way the giant Earth magnet pulls on the strong particles.
There is also an Aurora Australis that is occurring right now, except it’s raining too much for most to see it.
You know how in science fiction when someone has an energy shield and the energy shield gets hit by a weapon, the edges of the shield often shimmer and glow? That’s basically what’s happening here. Earth has a natural energy shield and the “edges” in the far north are glowing because the planet is getting hit by a lot of extra stuff right now.
The earth’s core is made of metal and that metal is hot and rotating. When you have moving metal with energy flowing through it, it produces a magnetic field. Earth’s magnetic field is very very large and it wraps the planet in a shield that deflects the most energetic particles coming from the sun. This energy shield touches the earth at the north and south poles. When the shield gets hit with extra energy from the sun, you can see the shield glow in the regions where it touches the upper atmosphere.
The sun is extremely overactive right now, with gigantic magnetic storms many times the size of Earth. As a result it’s pummeling the planetary shield and so we can see the glow much farther south than usual.
Maybe you’re familiar with [fluorescent lamps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_lamp)?
In a fluorescent lamp, electric energy is absorbed by the gas inside the lamp. Then the gas will release back part of this absorbed energy as photons — light that we can see. So basically a fluorescent lamp converts electricity into light, by absorbing excess energy then releasing photons in turn.
Auroras work in almost exactly the same way. Energetic particles from the sun get absorbed by gasses high up in the atmosphere, then this extra energy gets released again as photons (light) that we can see.
We have a mix of different gasses in the atmosphere (oxygen, nitrogen, etc.) and depending on the altitude the various gasses end up releasing light at different wavelengths — so we get reds, greens, yellows, etc.
The Earth’s magnetic field usually deflects particles from the sun towards the north & south poles; That’s why usually we can only see auroras near the poles. But sometimes, during times of intense solar activity or due to fluctuations of the Earth’s magnetic field, auroras can be seen far away from the polar regions.
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