About The Northern Lights

My earliest recollection of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, is from a song of the 1950s called "the Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen", which I always took to be a reference not to Scottish traffic arrangements but to the celestial phenomenon of bands, curtains or streamers of colored light that appear in the sky predominantly in the Arctic and Antarctic regions of the earth. In the Antarctic, the lights are called the Aurora Austral is, or Southern Lights. They are visible, though less frequently, also outside those zones. I do not know how often the Northern Lights appear in northern Scotland but in the far north of this country, in Finnish Lapland, the number of auroral displays can be as high as 200 a year. In southern Finland the number is usually fewer than 20.

Folklore abounds with explanations of the origins of the spellbinding celestial lights. In Finnish they are called "revenue", which means "fox fires" a name derived from an ancient fable of the arctic fox starting fires fire or spraying up snow with its brush-like tail. No matter that in English "foxfire" is a luminescent glow emitted by certain types of fungi growing on rotten wood. The true story is that the sun is the father of the auroras.

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The sun gives off high-energy charged particles (also called ions) that travel out into space at speeds of 300 to 1200 kilometers per second. A cloud of such particles is called a plasma. The stream of plasma coming from the sun is known as the solar wind. As the solar wind interacts with the edge of the earth's magnetic field, some of the particles are trapped by it and they follow the lines of magnetic force down into the ionosphere, the section of the earth's atmosphere that extends from about 60 to 600 kilometers above the earth's surface. When the particles collide with the gases in the ionosphere they start to glow, producing the spectacle that we know as the auroras, northern and southern. The array of colors consists of red, green, blue and violet. 

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