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
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.
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