The Only Guide to Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) - National Weather Service

also keeps in mind the aurora, according to NASA. The science behind the northern lights wasn't theorized up until the turn of the 20th century. Norwegian researcher Kristian Birkeland proposed that electrons discharged from sunspots produced the climatic lights after striking the Earth's magnetic field. The theory would ultimately prove correct, but not up until long after Birkeland's death.

When this image was taken on Jan. 22, the station was orbiting 261 miles (420 kilometers) above the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North America. Below the northern lights is a blanket of marmalade-colored airglow, a kind of luminescence triggered by ultraviolet light that activates chemical responses high in Earth's atmosphere.

(Image credit: NASA)What are the northern lights? At any given moment, the sun is ejecting charged particles from its corona, or upper atmosphere, creating what's called the solar wind. When that wind knocks into Earth's ionosphere, or upper environment, the aurora is born. In the Northern Hemisphere, the phenomenon is called the northern lights (aurora borealis), while in the Southern Hemisphere, it's called the southern lights (aurora australis)."These particles are deflected towards the poles of Earth by our planet's magnetic field and interact with our atmosphere, transferring energy and causing the environment to fluoresce," stated Billy Teets, an astronomer and the director of Dyer Observatory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

"Every kind of atom or particle, whether it's atomic hydrogen or a molecule like co2, takes in and radiates its own distinct set of colors, which is comparable to how every human being has a special set of finger prints," Teets told "A few of the dominant colors seen in aurorae are red, a shade produced by the nitrogen molecules, and green, which is produced by oxygen particles." While solar wind is constant, the sun's emissions go through an approximately 11-year cycle of activity.

This is when the northern lights are at their brightest and most regular. highyields.com , or period of peak activity, occurred in 2014, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), putting the next one in roughly 2025. In spite of a lot of advances in heliophysics and atmospheric science, much about the northern lights remains a mystery.