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Frank Bruno, age 12, of San Diego, Calf., for his question:

What are the Northern Lights?

The soldiers of the Roman emperor Tiberius were watching the flickering lights in the sky over a northern community   or so the story goes. Then they were ordered to march   a long dreary march   with the idea of subduing the blazing city and punishing whoever started the trouble. Imagine low foolish they felt when they discovered that they had seen, not the reflection of a blazing city, but a display of northern lights.

The Romans, of course, lived by the warm Mediterranean where the northern lights rarely show themselves. People who live in warm latitudes are excused from cruel winter weather. But they miss the magnificent auroras, the northern lights, which are seen b y the people who endure the cruel winters of, say, northern Canada and Alaska. Similar displays are seen in southern latitudes. The most dazzling displays are seen as we near the Arctic or Antarctic Circles for they seem to center around the earths poles.

The earth, of course, is a giant magnet. Its north and south magnetic poles correspond to the poles on a small toy magnet. Like any magnet, it is surrounded by an invisible field of magnetic force. A toy magnet can be made to line up fragments of steel or iron in the magnetic field which surrounds it. Imagine how much more powerful is the magnetic field which surrounds our great big earth.

The auroras take place inside the earth's magnetic field high above the ground. Most of them glimmer in an area from 80 to 130 miles above our heads. They center around the magnetic poles because they are directed here by the earth's powerful magnetic force.

It is believed that the display is caused b y particles corning from the sun itself. Sunspots are violent magnetic storms on the face of the sun during which streams of electrically charg6d particles are shot out into space. Some of these streaming particles come in our direction. As they near the earth, they feel the pull of its magnetic poles.  Some are drawn towards the north pole and some towards the south pole. The auroras occur when these streaming electrical particles strike the gaseous molecules high in our atmosphere.

In polar regions, a brilliant aurora may cover most of the sky. The glimmering, shimmering lights often form draperies of green, yellow and pearly grey. Looking up, a person may feel like a little ant standing under the hem of the living room curtains. Sometimes the aurora is merely a pale ghostly streak tiptoeing around the sky. Sometimes it is a radiant sunburst on the horizon, swelling and shrinking with arrows  of fiery red.NASA Spacecraft Make New Discoveries About Northern Lights
A fleet of NASA spacecraft, launched less than eight months ago, has made three important discoveries about spectacular eruptions of Northern Lights called "substorms" and the source of their power.
NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission observed the dynamics of a rapidly developing substorm, confirmed the existence of giant magnetic ropes and witnessed small explosions in the outskirts of Earth's magnetic field. The findings will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December.
The discoveries began on March 23, when a substorm erupted over Alaska and Canada, producing vivid auroras for more than two hours. A network of ground cameras organized to support THEMIS photographed the display from below while the satellites measured particles and fields from above.
“The substorm behaved quite unexpectedly," says Vassilis Angelopoulos, the mission's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The auroras surged westward twice as fast as anyone thought possible, crossing 15 degrees of longitude in less than one minute. The storm traversed an entire polar time zone, or 400 miles, in 60 seconds flat.”
Photographs taken by ground cameras and NASA's Polar satellite (also supporting the THEMIS mission) revealed a series of staccato outbursts each lasting about 10 minutes. Angelopoulos said that some of the bursts died out while others reinforced each other and went on to become major onsets.
Angelopoulos was quite impressed with the substorm's power and he estimated the total energy of the two-hour event at five hundred thousand billion Joules. That's equivalent to the energy of one magnitude 5.5 earthquake . Where does all that energy come from? THEMIS may have found the answer.
"The satellites have found evidence of magnetic ropes connecting Earth's upper atmosphere directly to the sun," said David Sibeck, project scientist for the mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "We believe that solar wind particles flow in along these ropes, providing energy for geomagnetic storms and auroras."
A magnetic rope is a twisted bundle of magnetic fields organized much like the twisted hemp of a mariner's rope. Spacecraft have detected hints of these ropes before, but a single spacecraft was insufficient to map their 3D structure. THEMIS' five identical micro-satellites were able to perform the feat.
"THEMIS encountered its first magnetic rope on May 20," said Sibeck. "It was very large, about as wide as Earth, and located approximately 40,000 miles (70,000 km) above Earth's surface in a region called the magnetopause." The magnetopause is where the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field meet and push against one another like sumo wrestlers locked in combat. There, the rope formed and unraveled in just a few minutes, providing a brief but significant conduit for solar wind energy.
THEMIS also has observed a number of small explosions in Earth's magnetic bow shock. "The bow shock is like the bow wave in front of a boat," explained Sibeck. "It is where the solar wind first feels the effects of Earth's magnetic field. Sometimes a burst of electrical current within the solar wind will hit the bow shock and—Bang! We get an explosion."
The THEMIS satellites are equipped with instruments that measure ions, electrons and electromagnetic radiation in space. The satellites will line up along the sun-Earth line next February to perform their key measurements. Researchers expect to observe, for the first time, the origin of substorm onsets in space and learn more about their evolution. Scientists from the US, Canada, Western Europe, Russia and Japan are contributing to the scientific investigation over the next two years.
THEMIS is the fifth medium-class mission under NASA's Explorer Program, which provides frequent flight opportunities for world-class scientific investigations within the heliophysics and astrophysics science areas.
The Explorer Program Office at Goddard manages the NASA-funded THEMIS mission. The University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory is responsible for project management, science and ground-based instruments, mission integration and post launch operations. ATK (formerly Swales Aerospace), Beltsville, Md., built the THEMIS probes.

 

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