Dancing strips of green, red, and purple light periodically illuminate the night sky in the Arctic Circle and in the region around Antarctica, called the aurora borealis. Earth’s upper atmosphere.
According to RT, when photons from this solar wind interact with atmospheric gases, they light up with bright colors and are pulled into fantastic shapes along Earth’s magnetic lines.
“Oxygen is red and green, and blue or purple is nitrogen,” James O’Donogo, a planetary scientist at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) told Live Science.
But is Earth the only place in the solar system where the aurora borealis can be seen?
And it turned out that the aurora borealis is not unique to the planet Earth, as it is also found on other celestial bodies, and this aurora borealis outside the planet takes more beautiful and strange forms.
“When you look at other planets, the ground rules change,” Tom Stallard, a planetary astronomer at the University of Leicester in the UK, told Live Science, for example a type of aurora that was recently discovered on Mars (known as a separate zigzag auroras) a snake in Halfway around the Red Planet, despite the fact that Mars only has patchy magnetic field lines, some auroras on Saturn are generated by weather patterns, according to 2021 research published in Geophysical Research Letters. Uranus’ magnetic field is tilted, like the planet itself around its axis, causing the aurora borealis to take complex shapes and shape in unexpected regions.
A 2017 study published in Nature found that the strongest auroras in the solar system occur on Jupiter, and that these intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation are up to 30 times stronger than those on Earth, but even with all that energy, you probably won’t be able to On seeing Jupiter’s aurora with the naked eye, where most of its light is emitted at wavelengths outside the visible spectrum, O’Donoghue said: “Infrared is the biggest emitter on Jupiter and Saturn, and then you have visible light, X-rays and radio too.”
According to experts elsewhere in the solar system, the definition of aurora borealis collapses, usually it is believed that the aurora is the glowing electromagnetic glow caused by the solar wind that occurs in the atmosphere of the planet (or moon), but Mercury has no atmosphere to speak of, but it experiences magnetic storms. A ground that produces the aurora borealis.
“If you look at the night side of Mercury with an X-ray spectrometer, you will see the rocks on the surface glow with X-ray emissions, so it’s like a solid-state aurora, and the X-ray spectrometer detects high-frequency light waves and is an important tool in astronomy,” Stallard said.
According to NASA, the solar winds do not produce some of Jupiter’s auroras, instead, they are created by particles emitted into the magnetosphere by the planet’s volcanic moon.
Scientists hope they can even look far enough into the universe to spot the first auroras on exoplanets. Nobody knows what these light shows are in store for, but they’re sure to be amazing. “All aurorae are fun and weird,” Stallard said.