Northern Lights

Scientists have developed a method to predict geomagnetic storms directly from solar observations.

“The radiation of excited atoms paints the sky with multi-colors and ignites the aurora—and the polar oval exists permanently, 24 hours per day,” said Podladchikova. As well as using the magnetic field derived from solar observations, “this approach opens a possibility to provide earlier polar aurora forecasts,” said Tatiana Podladchikova, associate professor at the Skoltech Center for Digital Engineering, research co-author of the study, in an email. That’s important, because the solar wind—a stream of electrons, protons and helium nuclei that is hurled at our planet—can sometimes be dangerous to astronauts, satellites and to power grids. The Northern (and Southern) Lights are caused by those charged particles from the Sun being channeled along the magnetic field lines to Earth’s magnetic poles, where they excite oxygen and nitrogen there. Having read widely about the Northern Lights I knew they were the very definition of unpredictable—and no hotelier could tell me otherwise. These cause geomagnetic storms—and they result in aurorae.