Aurorae Borealis

A detailed Summary of Aurorae Borealis

The Northern Lights and Kristian Birkeland

The northern lights have inspired awe and reverence in people all throughout the northern latitudes. At their most impressive, they form an immense halo of pulsating light around the pole, stretching hundreds of kilometers out into space. People in the 18th century were unsure what to make of these mysterious lights. The Lapps saw the lights as messengers of God which might strike down anyone foolish enough to provoke them. In Scandinavian folklore, the lights are reflections from icebergs, the wings of migrating geese, or from shoals or herring swimming close to the surface of the sea.

It was Galileo who first dubbed the term ?boreal aurora? to describe the northern lights, after Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn. Though the name stuck, it is misleading because aurora seen in southern latitudes glow pinkish-red. True aurora is green and white.

Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland (1867-1917) had long been fascinated with the strange and hypnotizing lights. In 1899 he and several others made a journey to a mountaintop in Norway, during which they experienced frostbite, week-long blizzards and months of sunless winter desolation. There he verified that the aurora was

In 1913, Birkeland traveled to Egypt to study the zodiacal lights and found himself stranded there because of the war in Europe. Isolated from friends and family, and already accustomed to drinking heavily, he started to take Veronal to cure his insomnia. At the age of 49, in 1917, he was found dead in a Tokyo hotel room after taking 20 times the normal dosage for Veronal.

Birkeland was eccentric and brilliant. An avid Egyptophile, he often wore a fez and red leather slippers with pointed toes. He was a highly controversial physicist in his day, keeping notes strung out everywhere and was thrown into the air by bolts of electricity on more than one occasion by one of his experiments gone awry. He arranged to give an important lecture on the morning of his wedding day and was obliged to speak very fast in order to reach the ceremony on time. After five long years of neglect, his wife left him.

A very rare ?veil? aurora appears as an extensive, uniform luminosity across the sky. If a veil is present but has dark holes where the sky is seeping through, it is called a black aurorae.

Ian Redmount, an associate professor at St. Louis University, and Martin Israel, a professor of physics at Washington University, said that as particles from the solar wind spiral around the lines of force in Earth?s magnetic field, they excite electrons in oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere. As the electrons return to their lower energy levels, they give off

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Category: Science