These lights are called auroras. If you’re near the North Pole, it is called an aurora borealis or northern lights. If you’re near the South Pole, it is called an aurora australis or the southern lights.
What are the two northern lights?
Polar lights (aurora polaris) are a natural phenomenon found in both the northern and southern hemispheres that can be truly awe inspiring. Northern lights are also called by their scientific name, aurora borealis, and southern lights are called aurora australis.
What is the difference between aurora australis and aurora borealis?
When that wind slams into Earth’s ionosphere, or upper atmosphere, 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).
Are there different types of auroras?
Researchers these days recognise that there are really only two main forms of aurora: the arc (discrete), and the patchy, pulsating aurora (diffuse). These are created by fundamentally different physical processes.
What are both the auroras in the north and South Pole called?
This results in an oval ring around each magnetic pole where auroras occur. The north pole aurora is called the aurora borealis and the aurora at the south pole is called the aurora australis. Depending on the level of recent solar activity, there may or may not be visible auroral activity all the way around the ring.
Is aurora borealis and northern lights the same?
Northern lights are also called by their scientific name, aurora borealis, and southern lights are called aurora australis.
What are the two most common and two most rare colors seen in auroras?
Most of the auroral features are greenish-yellow, but sometimes the tall rays will turn red at their tops and along their lower edges. On rare occasions, sunlight will hit the top part of the auroral rays to create a faint blue color.
Do auroras make noise?
What is clear is that the aurora does, on rare occasions, make sounds audible to the human ear. The eerie reports of crackling, whizzing and buzzing noises accompanying the lights describe an objective audible experience – not something illusory or imagined.
What is the southern aurora called?
aurora australis
In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the aurora australis, or southern lights.
Is aurora borealis more beautiful than aurora australis?
They are both spectacular and entrancing. You tend to find that the Aurora Borealis, in the North, gets more publicity, but the fact is that the Southern Lights can be just as impressive.
How many auroras are there?
Depending on how you count, there are as many as 27 Auroras in existence today. They are found on both coasts and from Minnesota to Texas, but tend to favor the North for reasons I discovered as I traveled.
What causes different aurora colors?
The unique colors of light produced by a gas are called its “spectrum”. The auroral lights’ colors are determined by the spectra of gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the height at which the most collisions take place. Incoming particles tend to collide with different gases at different heights.
Why do we call the northern and southern lights auroras?
It was the French scientist Pierre Gassendi who gave them this name after first seeing them in 1621. In the southern latitudes, it is known as Aurora Australis, Australis being the Latin word for “of the south”.
What does Borealis mean?
The word borealis is Latin for boreal, which simply means “northern.” The aurora borealis is not the only aurora on Earth. The aurora in the Southern Hemisphere is called aurora australis or the southern lights.
Can northern lights be white?
[The aurora or northern lights] only appear to us in shades of gray because the light is too faint to be sensed by our color-detecting cone cells. Thus the human eye views the northern lights generally in faint colors and as shades of grey/white.
What causes blue northern lights?
Why the different colors? The color of the aurora depends on which gas is being excited by the electrons and on how much energy is being exchanged. Oxygen emits either a greenish-yellow light (the most familiar color of the aurora) or a red light; nitrogen generally gives off a blue light.
Can you touch Northern Lights?
Secondly, the aurora are essentially photon emissions from nitrogen and oxygen molecules, so you can’t really touch it (as much as you can ‘touch’ a sunbeam). Even the gas that emits the photons is extremely tenuous.
How many times does the aurora borealis occur?
“Active periods are typically about 30 minutes long and occur every two hours, if the activity is high. The aurora is a sporadic phenomenon, occurring randomly for short periods or perhaps not at all.”
What happens when you whistle at the Northern Lights?
Thought to be the souls of the dead, the Sámi believed you shouldn’t talk about the Northern Lights. It was also dangerous to tease them by waving, whistling or singing under them, as this would alert the lights to your presence. If you caught their attention, the lights could reach down and carry you up into the sky.
What is the rarest aurora color?
It’s extremely rare to have an aurora without green. Green is the color people usually have in mind when they think of aurora. Above ~250km of altitude, the entities are extremely isolated and scares. The general density of the atmosphere is so low that particles rarely bump into each other anymore.
What causes red aurora?
Reds appear in the Aurora when solar particles react with Oxygen at higher altitudes, generally above 150 miles. At this height the Oxygen is less concentrated and is “excited” at a higher frequency or wavelength than the denser Oxygen lower down making reds visible.