How Aurora lights are formed?

Every second, one million tons of matter is blasted from the Sun at the velocity of one million miles per hour, and it's on a collision course with Earth!

But don't worry, this isn't the opening of an action movie. This is actually ‘The Journey of the Aurora Lights’, also known as northern and southern lights. They occur when high energy particles from the Sun collides with neutral atoms in Earth’s atmosphere.

The energy radiated from this accident delivers a display of light that mankind has wondered about for quite a long time. But the particles' excursion isn't as basic as leaving the Sun and showing up at Earth.

 Photo of Aurora lights by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash

                                          

Steps:

How about we track this intergalactic journey by focusing on three primary concerns of their excursion:

ð Leaving the Sun

ð Making a refueling break in the Earth's magnetic fields

ð Arriving at the Earth’s atmosphere.

Leaving the Sun

The protons and electrons making the Aurora Borealis leave from the Sun's corona, the outermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere and one of the hottest regions. 

The intense heat of corona causes the hydrogen and helium atoms of the Sun to vibrate and emit protons and electrons as if they were peeling off layers on a hot, sunny day. These free protons and electrons move too fast to be contained by the Sun's gravity and gather as plasma, an electrically charged gas.

  Photo of Sun's Corona by NASA on Unsplash

                                               

Making a refueling break in the Earth's magnetic fields

They travel away from the Sun as a storm of plasma, known as the solar wind. However, the Earth keeps the solar wind from voyaging straight into the planet by setting up a detour, the magnetosphere.

The magnetosphere is formed by the Earth's magnetic currents and protects Earth from the solar winds by ejecting the particles around the Earth. Their chance to proceed with the excursion down to the Earth’s atmosphere comes when the magnetosphere is overpowered by a new wave of travelers.

Arriving at the Earth’s atmosphere

This event is a coronal mass ejection, and it happens when the Sun shoots out an enormous bundle of plasma into the solar wind. At the point when one of these coronal mass ejections slams into the Earth, it overwhelms the magnetosphere and produces a magnetic storm. This heavy storm stresses the magnetosphere until it suddenly snaps back, like an overstretched elastic band, hurling a portion of the bypassed particles towards Earth.

The retracting band of the magnetic field hauls them down to the aurora ovals, which are the areas of the northern and southern lights.

Displaying the Aurora

After traveling 93 million miles across the galaxy, the Sun's particles finally produce their dazzling light show with the help of oxygen and nitrogen atoms present 20 to 200 miles above the surface of Earth.

The Sun's particles collide with the atoms, giving their energy to the Earth's neutral oxygen and nitrogen atoms.

When the atoms in the atmosphere come in contact with these particles, they get excited and emit photons. Photons are small packets of energy in the form of light.

Reason for variety of colors:

The colors that appear in the sky depend on the wavelength of the atom's photon.

Ø Excited oxygen atoms are responsible for the green and red colors

Ø Excited nitrogen atoms produce blue and deep red hues

The collection of these interactions is the thing that makes the northern and southern lights.

Nighttime is the best time to see this beautiful light display because the Aurora is much dimmer than sunlight and cannot be seen in the daytime.

Hope you enjoyed it!!!!!!