One of the North and South pole’s most iconic spectacles is the Northern Lights or Aurora as they are officially called. For generations, hundreds of civilians and scientists alike have wondered what exactly causes these bizarre looking halos to form, and recently, it appears that scientists have finally cracked the code. I’m your host Michael Tung, and this is 90SS. There has long been a suspected theory of how the Northern Lights operate: it originates at the Sun. The Sun’s surface is a pretty violent place, which means that normally, there are a lot of disruptions in the Sun’s activity. When those disruptions are especially strong, they can pull at the Earth’s magnetic field, moving it away from the planet. When eventually they “let go”, the magnetic field bounces and the force that is experienced with the bouncing creates what is called Alfvén waves, oscillating at high speeds back towards Earth. Electrons that are floating about sometimes are carried with the Alfvén waves, and when they enter the atmosphere, they are mixed with Nitrogen and Oxygen particles. Over a period of time, these elections will create the Northern Lights that people adore all around the world today. But how exactly were scientists able to prove that this is true? They could not go into space to prove it, as it is not possible to determine when the Northern Lights would shine, and that countless external factors could be at play when dealing with the real world. Instead, they tested in a simulator what would happen when the electrons interacted with the Alfvén waves and the Nitrogen and Oxygen particles. The results conclusively proved that the old theory was indeed true, and that the implications of it could help improve future technological developments on how particles interact, and continue to spar human interest in the unknown.
Photo by Lightscape on Unsplash
