What Causes The Northern Lights?

Morning Auroras!

So, the Northern Lights!

Beautiful and kinda supernatural looking.

So supernatural looking, in fact, these lights have garnered countless mythical explanations over the centuries.

For example:

The vikings thought they were a magical bridge to Asgard, where Thor, Odin, and a bunch of other Norse gods live.

Another Norse legend says that they are simply the light reflected off the Valkyrie’s shields.

The problem is, both of those theories are unsurprisingly… wrong.

So, what actually causes the Northern Lights?

Well, let's take a look at the earth real quick.

Then let's chop it in half.

See this stuff in the middle, that's hot molten iron.

This liquid iron basically just churns around inside the earth.

And it's this churning motion that turns the Earth into one giant iron based magnet.

Creating an absolutely MASSIVE magnetic field that wraps around the Earth.

This is what we call the Magnetosphere.

And honestly, without it, we’d all be dead long ago.

Let me explain.

The sun is so incredibly hot that it exists in a 4th state of matter.

See, you have:

• Gas (Airy stuff)
• Liquid (Runny stuff)
• Solid (Hard stuff)

But then… you have plasma. Which can only really be described as (Fuzzy stuff).

Anyway, this plasma is made up of a bunch of Ions (Which are basically just positively charged atoms), and electrons which kinda float freely around one another.

These particles have such a high energy they often escape the sun's massive gravitational field and fly towards Earth at like a million miles an hour.

This is what's called solar wind.

The Earth is CONSTANTLY being bombarded by these little tiny charged particles all day long. Even more during solar storms.

Luckily, most of these just bounce right off. (Thanks to our magnetic field)

But some of them do actually manage to get through at the places where the magnetosphere is weakest.

At the north and south poles.

When these energetic particles make it through into our atmosphere, they slam into different gas molecules. (Mostly oxygen and nitrogen)

This impact excites the gas molecules, so they have to shoot off some of this energy.

They do this in the form of light!

And different gasses at different heights in the atmosphere are what make the different colors.

The light from oxygen up to 150 miles in the sky appears as a yellowy green.

Above that, it emits a red/purple color.

And below 60 miles in the atmosphere, nitrogen creates a beautiful blue color.

But sometimes they can combine together, creating something like this:

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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