Science Talk: Aurorae

Aurorae are luminous emissions that occur at high altitudes in the night skies of Earth’s polar regions.
They often manifest as long, narrow curtains of green, red, or purple light that move rapidly and silently.
These displays result from interactions between disturbances in the solar wind—streams of charged particles emitted by the Sun at speeds of about 400 km/s—and Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere. Energetic electrons are guided along magnetic field lines toward the polar regions, where they collide with atmospheric atoms and molecules, exciting them and producing the characteristic auroral glow.
To illustrate these processes, I will present several short videos demonstrating how aurorae form on Earth and briefly introduce the analogous phenomena observed at Jupiter.