![]() This is how it is for electrons facing the increasing neutral density of the upper atmosphere. “People at the top of the stadium run towards the field, and as you get closer to the field, the crowd gets thicker and thicker. “It’s like storming the football field after a college game,” Kaeppler said. “It’s the same basic idea, except we're dealing with gases now instead.”įriction is a constant in the boundary layer where neutral atmosphere and plasma meet, but active auroras intensify everything. “We all know that we rub our hands together, you're going to get heat,” he said. “Friction is a great analogy,” Stephen Kaeppler, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Clemson University in South Carolina, and principal investigator for the NASA mission, said in a blog post on the agency’s website. Winds send the particles in different directions, and when they collide, interesting physics result, according to NASA. The transformation from plasma to neutral gas takes place in an extended atmospheric boundary layer where both intermix. A once-neutral gas transforms into an electrically reactive state of matter known as plasma.” “Energized by the Sun’s unfiltered rays, electrons are pried from their atoms, which then take on a positive charge. "But hundreds of miles above us, our air begins to fundamentally change character,” the space agency said on its website. However, we’re here to provide you with the information you need to have the best shot at successfully witnessing this natural phenomenon. Although you have the best chance of spotting the lights during these months, they are notoriously elusive and unpredictable. Life on our planet exists in the troposphere, Earth’s lowest atmospheric layer, and the air we breathe is made up of neutral, magnetically balanced atoms and molecules with all their electrons accounted for, NASA explained. The Northern Lights dance through the sky from roughly September to April. During solar storms, the sun emits electrically charged ions that move away in a stream of plasma, an ionized gas, known as the “solar wind.” The vivid colors glow when the plasma slams into the Earth’s ionosphere about 60 to 80 miles above the the planet’s surface.Īs the National Weather Service explains the phenomenon, the lights glow “similarly to how a neon sign lights up when electrons pass through inert gas.” What NASA Expects To LearnĪurora borealis displays are favored in cold-weather regions near the poles, but the energy exchange that causes them is an important source of heat, according to NASA, which has plans to blast two rockets through an active aurora to learn more. ![]() The science behind the auroras - in the Southern Hemisphere, they’re called the aurora australis - is complicated. ![]()
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