During the last week of September a phenomenal weather event (Northern Lights) took place in Canada, recorded in Churchill, Manitoba.
According to the video’s author – and fellow Twitter user – Vincent Ledvina: “Real-time video of one of the most colorful Subauroras I’ve ever seen! This was last week in Churchill, Manitoba.” You can see the wonderful images that Mother Nature provides in the following video.
But how do the so-called polar lights actually form? They appear thanks to the effect of fluorescent lights and glow, which occurs in the sky over the North Pole. The Sun provides our planet with heat, light, and particles, and Earth’s magnetic field shields us from much of the energy and incident particles released by our planetary system’s largest star.
The constant solar wind and solar storms produce a type of coronal mass ejectionthat is, the sun releases a huge bubble of electrified gas that can travel through space at high speeds and hit our planet.
When solar storms reach Earth, some of the energy and small particles move along the magnetic field linesmainly in the region of the north and south poles, and penetrates the last layers of the earth’s atmosphere.
There, the particles interact with various atmospheric gases, causing different colored lights to appear in the sky. It is gases such as oxygen that make the colors green and red appear fluorescent.
Nitrogen, on the other hand, produces an intense glow with blue and violet colors. When these gases are mixed together, the colors are numerous and distinct: pink, yellow, orange, and white are other colors that can appear.
As for the variant described and observed in the video above, it is the subform also known as the magnetospheric subform or subauroraa short-term disturbance in the Earth’s magnetosphere that causes energy to be released from the “tail” of the magnetosphere and injected into the high-latitude ionosphere.