The Amazing Radiation Secret of the Northern Lights

Behind the Beauty of the Northern Lights

The astrophysical and geological events that occurred over billions of years ago resulted in our reliance on a delicate balance of Earth’s various systems.

Usually, human beings take this for granted. We shrug off off the gift of life and focus on the screens set before us, muddied down in the day-to-day and hour-to-hour activities that we call life.

That’s not to say that reading from a screen is a bad thing. You’re reading this right now, aren’t you? It’s to say sometimes we should take a step back to understand the wonders around us.

Diving into the Importance of the Magnetosphere

Earth is comprised of a series of systems, cycles, and “spheres,” which enable it to function. From our climate, biosphere, water cycle, life as we know it would not exist without these routines.

One of these vital systems, the magnetosphere, makes up a planet’s magnetic field. It is the realm where electric charges move. It’s how magnets attract and repel forces.

Gusts of solar wind hit Earth’s magnetic field, causing charged solar particles to rain down over the poles, lighting up the atmosphere when they collide.

As innocent as it sounds, solar winds are energized streams of charged electrons and protons flowing outward from the Sun at roughly 560 miles per second (900 km/s) in the form of plasma, at a temperature of 1.8 million °F (1 million °C). 

The relentless solar winds could strip the Earth of its protective atmospheric layers, our shield to the Sun’s dangerous ultraviolet radiation. For visual comparison, Mars lost its bubble of magnetism billions of years ago. This left our red neighbor in its present state: oceanless, barren, lifeless. We will have to update this piece of information in case the Mars Perseverance Rover fulfills its mission of seeking

signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth

but we will have to wait for a couple of years.

Thankfully, Earth has retained its magnetosphere, giving us a different fate.

If there were no magnetic field, we might have a very different atmosphere left without life as we know it

notes Eftyhia Zesta of the Geospace Physics Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Earth’s magnetosphere has seemed to protect our atmosphere, which is key to protecting a variety of planetary systems and cycles.

The Northern Lights: A Tale as Old as Time 

While auroras have been seen by ancients Greeks, Norse, Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, the lights often don’t venture farther than the Earth’s poles, where the auroral zones are.

That’s not to say that they don’t. Here are some of the most fascinating “apparitions” of the Northern Lights in places where they shouldn’t have been!

• At the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 14, 1862, an aurora was seen through the Gulf States, presumably caused by a large solar flare.
• Frederic Edwin Church painted an interpretation of the lights seen during the Civil War, completed in 1865, showing the interpretation of the end of the bloody conflict.
• A powerful geomagnetic storm in 1859 wrought havoc on the local telegraph systems around the world. English amateur astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson independently recorded this solar flare.
• On August 29, 2019, auroras australis were seen as far north as Queensland, Australia, about 2224 miles (3579 km) more north than they are typically seen in Queenstown, New Zealand.
• A few days later on September 1, auroras were seen in the Caribbean and the Rocky Mountains, in addition to Europe, Hawaii, and Japan. The lights were so bright in the Northeast US, that people were reading the newspapers at night.

There’s Still So Much To Learn about the Northern Lights

A series could be dedicated to the uniqueness of the Blue Marble, focusing on aspects that we don’t see in our everyday run-of-the-mill, but we couldn’t live without.

Honestly, most people haven’t heard of the magnetosphere, let alone its interactions with the sun.

However, our lives are written in these details, that fortunately allow us to reside on this habitable planet.

If you want too to see the Aurora Borealis this year and pause for a moment to understand the beauty, the power, and the science behind this fantastic phenomenon, here are some of the best places in North America (among others) to do it:

• Alaska;
• The Canadian Arctic (Yellowknife, Yukon, Alberta)
• Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota.

If you ever saw the Northern Lights with your own eyes, please take advantage of our comment section below and tell us what you felt and how the entire experience was! If you have pictures to share with the other science buffs around here, even better!