Bright Aurora Phenomenon by Ivanna Ramirez

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/08/stunning-images-of-the-northern-lights-as-two-space-weather-phenomena-coincide/

This week, the aurora brought hundreds of people out into the darkness with their cameras in hopes of capturing its colorful display. (The same thing happened at the South Pole, but only penguins were around to see it.)

As explained by NASA, the phenomenon is caused by solar wind — streams of charged particles escaping the sun — that bumps into the Earths magnetic field and travels along it toward the poles. There, electrons from the sun interact with gases in the earth’s upper atmosphere, “exciting” them in physics terms. As the gas molecules calm down, they release particles of light, called photons. The colors of the light depend on what gases are being affected; nitrogen tends to produce blue light, oxygen emits green, or sometimes red.

Wednesday night’s aurora was particularly vibrant because of the position of the sun’s “coronal holes,” which send high-speed particles hurtling away from the sun’s surface. Right now, the holes are near the suns’s equator, meaning that the particles head out along the same line of latitude as Earth instead of  “up” and “down” into the emptiness of space. It also helps that this is happening in autumn, which, according to Britain’s national weather service, is a better time for auroras, though we don’t quite understand why.