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The Aurora Borealis Essay

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The Aurora Borealis is made when storms on the the sun form solar winds, or large streams of charged particles streaming toward the earth.These streams could have upward of ten million megawatts of electrical power. That is enough power to light up Los Angeles. It generally takes about three days for these streams of particles to reach the earth's upper atmosphere, or ionosphere. When these charged particles hit the earth's atmosphere, they excite the atoms contained in the atmosphere. These excited atoms have a higher energy state that usual and so want to get back to a more normal energy state. The excited atoms give off excess energy in the form of heat, or the case of the Aurora Borealis, light. The trillions of excited atoms give off …show more content…

Ionic Nitrogen produces the blue light and neutral Nitrogen gives off the red-purple and the rippled edges. Imagine if the atmosphere were made of Neon gas and Sodium gas. We would see red-orange and yellow auroras!

The aurora can be seen most strongly at the poles of the Earth. In the north, it is called Aurora Borealis and in the south, it is called Aurora Australias. Of the two poles, the aurora can be seen the strongest near the arctic circle in the Northern Hemisphere. The reason that the Aurora can only be seen at the poles has to do with how the Earth's magnetic field acts. The Earth has a metal core and acts much like a bar magnet with two poles and a magnetic field. Remember those charged particles that come from the sun and hit the atmosphere? Those charged particles get sucked into the Earth's magnetic field and are then channeled toward the poles, where they are channelled toward a ring around each pole. The charged particles are trapped in the loops of the magnetic field and are then carried toward the poles, where the particles hit the atmosphere and create the aurora that we see.

Is the aurora only found on Earth? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. Recently, scientists discovered that Jupiter has its own aurora. Using the Hubble Telescope, they were able to find out more about this phenomenon. They found that the aurora on Jupiter is not

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