What are the northern lights?
The Sun is stormy and has its own kind of weather. It is so hot and active that even the Sun’s gravity cannot hold its atmosphere in check! Energy flows away from the Sun toward Earth in a stream of electrified particles that move at speeds around a million miles per hour. Now that is fast! These particles are called plasma, and the stream of plasma coming from the Sun is called the solar wind. The more active the Sun, the stronger the solar wind. The solar wind constantly streams toward Earth, but don’t worry because a protective magnetic field surrounds our planet. The same magnetic field that makes your compass point north also steers the particles from the Sun to the north and south poles. The charged particles become trapped in magnetic belts around the Earth. When a large blast of solar wind crashes into the Earth’s magnetic field, the magnetic field first gets squeezed and then the magnetic field lines break and reconnect. The breaking and reconnecting of the magnetic field line
Question submitted by Jim Troph of Holt. Another common name for the Northern Lights is the Aurora Borealis. An aurora is a shimmering ribbon or curtain of turquoise light containing patches of pink and red light. Although we see the auroras here on Earth, they are caused by events near the Sun. The Sun is surrounded by a halo of gas which is constantly expanding into space and spreading pieces of atoms in every direction. This phenomenon is called the solar wind and it is made up of mostly protons and electrons. Protons are positively charged particles while electrons are negatively charged particles in an atom. The Earth acts like one gigantic magnet with lines of magnetic force curving out into space and converging near the North and South poles. Once the solar particles approach the Earth they are pulled in and travel along these lines until they are dumped into the Earths atmosphere. When the solar particles collide with nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere some of them bec
