What are aurora lights caused by?

The Northern Lights are actually the result of collisions between gaseous particles in the Earth’s atmosphere with charged particles released from the sun’s atmosphere. The most common auroral color, a pale yellowish-green, is produced by oxygen molecules located about 60 miles above the earth.

What kind of light is Aurora?

Answer. The northern lights, one of several astronomical phenomena called polar lights (aurora polaris), are shafts or curtains of colored light visible on occasion in the night sky. Aurora borealis – the Northern Lights.

What exactly are the northern lights?

Northern lights, also known as aurora borealis, are an interaction between Earth’s magnetic field and charged particles emitted by the sun. The sun has its own solar wind that sends out charged particles. These particles then spiral around Earth’s magnetic fields.

Do other planets have auroras?

Do other planets have auroras? Any planet with a sufficiently dense atmosphere that lies in the path of the solar wind will have auroras. Auroras have been photographed on Jupiter, Saturn, and even on some planets’ moons. Our moon doesn’t have an aurora because it doesn’t have the requisite atmosphere.

What colors are included in auroras?

The Aurora Borealis is most often seen in a striking green color, but it also occasionally shows off its many colors ranging from red to pink, blue to purple, dark to light. The reason that the aurora is seen in so many colors is that our atmosphere is made up of many different compounds like Oxygen and Nitrogen.

Does the aurora make a sound?

What is clear is that the aurora does, on rare occasions, make sounds audible to the human ear. The eerie reports of crackling, whizzing and buzzing noises accompanying the lights describe an objective audible experience – not something illusory or imagined.

How often do auroras appear?

“Active periods are typically about 30 minutes long, and occur every two hours, if the activity is high. The aurora is a sporadic phenomenon, occurring randomly for short periods or perhaps not at all.”

How does aurora look with the naked eye?

Auroras appear to the naked eye as a very faint, white glow in the night sky to the magnetic north. Many auroras are totally invisible to the naked eye or can only be seen by looking at them indirectly, i.e. out of the corner of your eye. It is extremely rare to see them in colour with the naked eye.

What colour is aurora?

Most of the auroral features are greenish-yellow, but sometimes the tall rays will turn red at their tops and along their lower edges. On rare occasions, sunlight will hit the top part of the auroral rays to create a faint blue color.

Where are the aurora lights located?

Aurora borealis locations are found in all the northernmost latitudes, from Greenland to Scandinavia and from the Yukon to Alaska. The best locations to see aurora borealis lights are found where the night sky is dark, and it helps when that night sky is far north.

Where are the aurora lights?

AURORAS OCCUR along ring-shaped regions around the north and south geomagnetic poles. Fairbanks, Alaska, is a good place for Aurora watching because it is under this region in the north, where people see Aurora Borealis , or northern lights; the southern Aurora is Aurora Australis.

Where can you see the aurora borealis?

The most popular place for viewing the rare and spectacular phenomenon in Alaska is Fairbanks. Even though it’s located just below the Arctic Circle , 180 mi (290 km) south to be more precise, the aurora borealis appears quite frequently there.

What causes the aurora borealis’ colors?

The colors in the aurora were also a source of mystery throughout human history. But science says that different gases in Earth’s atmosphere give off different colors when they are excited. Oxygen gives off the green color of the aurora, for example. Nitrogen causes blue or red colors.