Last week the northern lights lit up the sky with bright shades of green and red starting on Valentine's Day.The lights themselves were not the strange part, but rather what triggered them. Why? Because scientists don't know what the cause actually was.
"Sometimes the sky surprises us," astronomer Tony Phillips explained on spaceweather's website. "On Feb. 14-15, with little warning, geomagnetic activity rippled around the Arctic Circle, producing an outbreak of auroras that veteran observers said was among the best in months."
Auroras are usually triggered from solar storms. These storms flare up and eject bursts of plasma filled with super-heated electrons and protons, known as a coronal mass ejections (CME). Once those protons and electrons reach Earth's upper atmosphere they interact with gases such as Oxygen, Hydrogen, and others in the air and produce the beautiful colors you see. The problem with this set of northern lights is that there was no known CME that could have produced such a pretty display of lights.
"The reason for the outburst is still not completely clear," Phillips revealed. "No CME was obvious in local solar wind data at the time; the disturbance just … happened."
Sources: NASA, Space.com, Yahoo News, Spaceweather.com
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