Mikaylin Turner
2nd hour Chemistry
12/17/14
The Science of Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis
The Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis have always been compelling to people from all over the world. People travel thousands of miles to get a chance to see the Lights. Even while those people are gazing at the Lights, they don’t know what they are really looking at. Aurora Borealis, Northern Lights, and Aurora Australis, Southern Lights, are not only beautiful but, as many people don’t know, are made up of elements, magnetic forces, and electrical forces. The Lights are created when electronically charged particles from the sun enter earth’s atmosphere. These Lights are typically pale green or pink. Sometimes they can be shades of reds, blues, yellows, and violets. They appear in the sky as patches, scattered clouds of light, streamers, arcs, rippling curtains, or shooting rays. How the Northern and Southern Lights are created is not a hard concept to understand. Highly charged electrons from the solar wind enter earth’s atmosphere, they follow lines of magnetic force generated by earth’s core and flow through the magnetosphere. As the electrons enter the atmosphere they encounter atoms of oxygen and nitrogen at about 20-200 miles above earth’s surface. Each color seen depends on the atmosphere. The green occurs when electrons are mixed with oxygen up to 150 miles in the atmosphere. The red occurs when electrons meet oxygen above 150 miles. The blue appears when electrons mix with nitrogen up to 60 miles. Lastly the color purple happens when nitrogen and the electron collide above 60 miles. Eventually all of these colors will mix and shift causing the beautiful patterns. There are several places in the world to see the Lights. They are typically seen in the northern and southern hemispheres. People have seen the aurora borealis as far south as New Orleans in the western