The phenomenon that produces flashes of color in the sky near the poles. The first person to interest them from an academic perspective was Galileo Jalil, but the one who truly devoted his life to studying it was the Norwegian physicist Christian Birkeland.
To the Vikings, those strange glows in the sky were the radiance of the Valkyrie warrior armor. The Eskimos believed that through them they reached a path to the place where the spirits of the earth and their ancestors lived.
There are many cultures that have tried to find answers that can explain how the sky was painted green and blue at certain times and in certain places. Magic, but above all the northern or southern lights are the science.
Let’s start from the beginning: define it. Aurora Borealis is a bright phenomenon that can be observed during the winter season along a strip that stretches across Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Russia. El País de Madrid explains that these light halos are produced when “upon reaching the Earth, the charged particles – protons, electrons, and helium nuclei – that form the solar wind by the Earth’s magnetic field are deflected towards the polar regions, where they collide with the upper layers of the atmosphere and emit Energy in the form of light, which is similar to what happens in a fluorescent tube. “
The person responsible for the name “twilight” was Galileo Galilei in 1619. It was based on the name of the Greek goddess of dawn, Aurora, and Boreas, the northern wind.
But they are not only located in the north. Aurora, as a National Geographic publication explains, is also in the South. “The fact that there are fewer human settlements in the Antarctic makes the Northern Lights more popular and easier to see, but this phenomenon occurs equally at both poles.”
A recent NASA study found that the unique green colors respond to the “excitement” of oxygen. For its part, the nitrogen produces a blue, purple, and even reddish light that can border some areas of the aurora borealis.
At the same time, a team of scientists has succeeded in showing that auroras make a sound similar to the clicking noise that occurs when walking on dry leaves. However, it can rarely be heard from the surface because the sound is emitted as far as 70 kilometers from the ground.
Thanks to the Hubble telescope, we know that our planet is not the only planet on which this phenomenon can be estimated. The magnetic fields of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune interact with the solar winds that generate auroras.
