A photo posted online shows the bright orange lights of the northern lights over Canada.
Recently, a solar storm hit Earth, and pumpkin-colored lights appeared in the night sky above Canada. The problem is that orange auroras shouldn’t exist.
“The orange color was gorgeous, just incredible,” aurora photographer Harlan Thomas told Spaceweather.com. “The lights in the center shone for over 20 minutes.”
Thomas took the colorful photo on Oct. 19 over a pond west of Calgary, Alberta, about three days after giant coronal mass ejections (CMEs) began slowly drifting from the Sun toward Earth.
The aurora borealis occurs when high-energy particles from CMEs or the solar wind bypass the Earth’s magnetic shield and superheat gas molecules in the upper atmosphere. Excited molecules release energy in the form of light, and its color depends on the element that is excited. The two most common colors of auroras are red and green, both of which are emitted by oxygen molecules at different altitudes (red auroras appear at higher altitudes than green ones). But when solar particles penetrate deep into the atmosphere, they can also produce rare pink auroras by exciting nitrogen molecules.
Theoretically, oxygen and nitrogen molecules can emit orange wavelengths under certain conditions. However, even when this happens, the orange color is suppressed by other colors emitted by the surrounding molecules. Therefore, they are almost impossible to see, reported Spaceweather.com.
“Sometimes there is a mixture of the two processes (red and green auroras) which tricks the camera and the eye so that they appear to be orange. In fact, this aurora is red and green at the same time,” explains Kjelmar Oksavik, researcher in space meteorologist and aurora borealis expert at the University of Bergen in Norway.
2023-11-02 04:01:32
#Aurora #Borealis #Shouldnt
