The Aurora Borealis

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By waldo.

On the nineteenth of September in the year of two-thousand and twelve we saw, for many of us the first time, the famed, revered, and mythical Aurora Borealis. Glowing in streaks of green, flowing towards the North. Green because of the highly charged particles from outer space bombarding the oxygen atoms in the highest part of our atmosphere, the thermosphere, causing them to release photons in order to return to a non-excited so called “ground” state. Should one happen to see red or blue, both are attributed to the element of nitrogen, the most abundant element on our atmosphere, the former attributed to the loosing of an electron and returning to its grounded state, and the latter from gaining an electron and elevating it to a higher excited energy state. But red may also be attributed to oxygen as well due to a higher energy level in the excited atoms, though seeing red form oxygen can be hard to detect. In the far reaches of this part of our atmosphere oxygen is the primary element followed by nitrogen and lower elevations thus one sees auroras in the following orders of colors from most common to least common, green, pink, red, yellow, and blue. This color gradient is due to how far down the ionizing energy can reach into our atmosphere and thus what elements it can ionize.

Now whats causing all of this excitement you may ask your self? The energy is provided from solar winds from the sun, which is simply a name given to electrons and protons which are continually being ejected from the sun. These charged particles race through space to finally collide with our magnetosphere (map of the magnetosphere), which is an invisible formation of the magnetic field of our planets core which radiates out and traps the free charged particles and accelerates them towards the poles. At the poles the magnetic fields converge and those the particles trapped in them concentrate here. The Aurora is usually only seen during the dark hours of the day and at that not always visible, but they are always there to some degree, especially as you travel closer to the poles. If you happen to notice the aurora streaking or appearing curtain like it is because the light emissions are concentrated on the magnetic fields. The pictures above and below show this effect quite well and the one at the bottom shows a rift in the magnetic field where no aurora was present for the entirety of the time of this particular instance.