Strange Phenomena, Pink Auroras

Moderate solar storms may not affect us directly, nor alter our daily lives, although they can cause moderate problems to satellite communication systems and electrical networks and can also produce auroras and in fact this past week numerous auroras have been seen in Canada, Northern Europe and Northern United States.

And in addition there has been a mysterious event that has intrigued fans of hunting auroras photographically, which are many by the way in the Nordic countries, an Aurora occurs when an injection of energetically charged solar particles, also known as solar plasma, collides with the earth's magnetosphere, which is the magnetic field that is created in the hot core of our planet and surrounds us protecting us from most cosmic radiation and dangerous events such as solar particles.

But the Earth has two weak points in this shield that protects us and those points correspond to the magnetic poles, which is precisely where the magnetic field comes from, there the solar energetic particles can reach the gases of the upper layers of the atmosphere and transfer their energy to them.

The phenomenon is almost the same as the one that occurs when we light a neon lamp, the tubes have a gas inside and when receiving electrical energy, that gas is ionized and begins to emit light, depending on the type of gas or the combination of gases. the lamp emits a light of one color or another, for example, neon itself, which is a noble gas, gives an orange color, argon gives a light blue color and another noble gas such as krypton emits purple light.

The same thing happens to the gases of the upper layers of the atmosphere, depending on the amount of energy they receive they can emit a characteristic color, for example nitrogen or oxygen can emit different tones and different colors depending on the energy they receive, for Of course, the auroras, even if you live in the north, are not there every day and each one is different.

This week we have two spectacular auroras, a beautiful one that means a very special thing for scientists and another very rare one that gave rise to a mystery; the spectacularly beautiful one that I just showed you is the Pink Aurora captured on November 2 by Markus Varik from Thompson in Norway, this type of auroras is very rare, in fact Markus said verbatim “If you spend 10 years living inside the Polar Circle Arctic you will see many auroras, I have been guiding aurora tours full time for the last decade leading over a thousand tours I thought I had seen it all, we went out flat early the night of November 2 to chase the lights and surprise”.

The pink color indicates something very special in most auroras, they are green, which is the normal color of oxygen atoms that are hit by energy particles and that usually occurs between 100 and 300 kilometers high, but the pink color appears when energetic particles from space arrive lower than normal, hitting nitrogen molecules below 100 kilometers high.

The energetic particles were able to get so low because of a crack in the earth's magnetic field the energetic particles rushed through that gap and penetrated deep enough to reach those lower layers of the atmosphere and alter those gases to produce that Bright pink aurora.

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