Aurora lights in red hues were visible from Ladakh’s pristine skies at night, in the intervening hours between May 10 and May 11.
Key points
- These lights, called auroras, are usually seen in high-latitude regions (when measured from the equator), namely the North and the South Pole.
- When witnessed near the North they are called Aurora Borealis, while those in the South are called Aurora Australis.
- Auroras are bright and colourful lights, formed due to an active interaction in Space between charged solar winds and the Earth’s magnetosphere.
- Solar winds are ejections of charged particles from the Sun’s atmosphere, mostly composed of protons and electrons.
- During one kind of solar storm called a coronal mass ejection, the Sun burps out a huge bubble of electrified gas that can travel through space at high speeds.
- The magnetosphere is the region surrounding the Earth where the dominant magnetic field is the Earth’s, rather than the magnetic field of interplanetary Space. It protects the Earth against solar winds and is strongest at the poles.
- However, sometimes solar wind particles flow down the Earth’s magnetic field. Auroras are produced when these particles collide with atoms and molecules in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
- There, the particles interact with gases in our atmosphere resulting in beautiful displays of light in the sky. Oxygen gives off green and red light. Nitrogen glows blue and purple.
- The source of these storms was Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), which are large ejections of magnetic particles and plasma from the Sun’s corona – the outermost part of its atmosphere.
