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?
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:
- Advay Kulkarni
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