The Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights are natural phenomena featuring beautifully colored light displays over the Earth. All of it happens due to the sun, inside the sun it is 14 million degrees Celsius. And due to the tremendous pressure, the hydrogen atoms are sqeezed into helium atom, because of the heat due to the nuclear reaction the light radiates outward. The electrically charged gas so called plasma is thrown out from the sun which is so called solar storm.

Screenshot (10)

when highly charged electrons from the solar wind interact with elements in the earth’s atmosphere, Solar winds stream away from the sun at speeds of million miles per hour. When they reach the earth, some hours after leaving the sun, they follow the lines of magnetic force generated by the earth’s core, they deflects the earths magnetic field which creates a funnel and the gas travels through the magnetic lines towards the poles, due to which Arora occurs.

­The colour of the aurora depends on which atom is struck, and the altitude of the meeting.

  • Green – oxygen, up to 150 miles in altitude
  • Red – oxygen, above 150 miles in altitude
  • Blue – nitrogen, up to 60 miles in altitude
  • Purple/violet – nitrogen, above 60 miles in altitude

So, what do you think?

Published by Abhijit

29 thoughts on “What is northern light (Aurora Borealis)? How does it occur?”

  1. I think, if I am able to capture photos of the Aurora, I will link back to this post. Also, the next time I see them I will think about how high they are, mostly greens here. ☺ Nice post.

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s