Localized entirely without your kitchen.
(Science Week, day 7!)
Once again our wondrous Science Week comes to an end, and we end it on a wondrous note.
This week is partially good exercise for the mind and mindset. If I want to share something I don't know much about, I have to learn at least a little. If there's too much to learn, I have to acknowledge how little I know. Either state is equally suitable for these days, since the act of discovering the truth about the universe, especially if you're the first one making the discovery, requires wondering about what lies outside one's knowledge.
The Northern Lights? I'd always heard of them, but have never seen them and haven't known what they are. I thought the "aurora" which preceded the "borealis" (or the "australis") was a more generalized term. But Oxford states only one definition:
a natural electrical phenomenon characterized by the appearance of streamers of reddish or greenish light in the sky, especially near the northern or southern magnetic pole. The effect is caused by the interaction of charged particles from the sun with atoms in the upper atmosphere. In northern and southern regions it is respectively called aurora borealis or Northern Lights and aurora australis or Southern Lights…
(Actually, there is a second "literary" definition whose entire entry is "the dawn." Perhaps they exhausted their word budget on that first one, which goes beyond the call of a mere dictionary and explains the glow.)
Anyway. Charged particles from a star interacting with particles in the upper atmosphere, becoming visible? Presumably there's something about the near-tangential collision which keeps aurora from appearing nearer the equator, but that will have to constitute the eventual fruits of this fertilizing seed within me.
As NASA has demonstrated, the phenomenon itself is bountiful:
And it doesn't even seem to require a "class M" planet, as shown by units such as Cassini and Hubble atop Saturn and Jupiter:
But the final words this year are reserved for Neil and Thomas from the "Chasing Lights" tour in Norway, with the specialized ending to their fine recreation of one of the Internet's favoured sketches.
Gentlemen? Take us out.