Aurorae

 


 All you need to know, 

Aurorae


Introduction:



    Have you seen those beautiful green and red lights in the sky that appear in Polar Regions of the earth? These lights are nothing else but Aurorae. Even though they seem like beautiful hanging lights in the sky, there is a scientific reason behind it and I’m going to tell you about these beautiful hanging lights in the sky.

1. What is an aurora?



If you go near Polar Regions of earth you might see some beautiful lights in sky thee lights are known as aurorae. Aurorae are a natural light display in sky. Aurorae are actually a disturbance in the Earth’s magnetosphere caused by the solar winds coming from the sun.

the word "aurora" is derived from the name of the Roman goddess of the dawn’

scientifically aurorae are light forming after collision of solar waves and gas atoms.

3.    2. History of aurorae.





       The history of aurorae doesn’t start from scientists it starts from myths. In Japanese    folklore, pheasants were considered messengers from heaven. In some places aurorae was associated with fire mostly for e.g. an evil spirit creating a large fire, ashes, wildfire, people believed that ghostly spirits spoke to people through aurorae, they even said that aurorae were campfires of spirits in land of dead.

But as the times changed, the term of ‘aurorae’ was first used by Pierre Gassendi and Galileo Galilei at this time Aurorae got its name. Afterwards a Norwegian scientist Kristian Olaf Bernhard Birkeland organized some expeditions to Norway’s high latitude regions a network of observatories under the aurorae regions to collect magnetic field data. The results of the expeditions were conducted from 1899 to 1900 and he became the first one to explain aurorae in great detail. Later on he was known as ‘Father of Aurorae’ and ‘The first space scientist’

   3. What is solar wind?

See the source image


Now this is the main thing, solar wind is like the start of aurorae but what is it exactly? Solar wind is stream of charged particles coming from the upper part of the sun Which is called as corona. The composition of this plasma is mostly made up of electrons, protons and alpha particles. These particles can escape gravity because of their high energy. At a distance of more than a few solar radii from the Sun they can reach of speed up to 250–750 km/s.  

4. Formation of aurorae.



Our sun it is a medium sized star and as I said before it emits tons of solar winds when these winds come towards earth our earth’s magnetic field acts as a shield for these waves coming and when these charged particles hit our magnetic field most of them get deflected but some of the charged particles flow along the earth’s magnetic field and hit the earth’s atmosphere they emit beautiful lights which are nothing but aurorae.

Scientifically when the solar particles hit the earth’s gas atoms, the gas atoms loose electrons due to collision by absorbing energy and charged ions emit excess energy and therefore emitting light.

5. Where can I see aurorae?



After looking at some beautiful images of aurorae question comes in mind that where can I see aurorae well, there are some specific countries in which you can see aurorae they are: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Canada in the north and Tasmania, New Zealand and Antarctica in south.

6. Aurorae view from space.



If we can see aurorae from earth of course we can see them from space too and from space they look even more beautiful than from earth.

7. Aurorae from other planets



Just as earth has its own aurorae other planets also have their aurorae just the difference is each planet show different colors of aurorae. For e.g. Jupiter has purple aurorae whereas Saturn has got pink and uranus has blue

8. Importance of Aurorae



Everything has its own importance and so has aurorae aurorae helps us to find which types of gasses are there on other planets and how do we do it iv'e told you before that each gas emits its own different color so by looking at the color we can predict which gas is present on that particular planet. Last but not least we can also find planets which are habitable for humans to live!


So thank you!

Also see:

Black Holes

The Coronavirus

- Advay Kulkarni


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