Red Aurora Over Australia
Explanation:
Why would the sky glow red?
Aurora.
A solar storm in 2012, emanating mostly from active
sunspot region 1402,
showered particles on the Earth that excited oxygen atoms high in the
Earth's atmosphere.
As the excited element's electrons fell back to their ground state, they emitted
a
red
glow.
Were oxygen atoms lower in Earth's atmosphere excited,
the glow
would be predominantly green.
Pictured here, this high red aurora is visible just above the horizon last week
near
Flinders,
Victoria,
Australia.
The sky that night, however, also glowed with more familiar but more distant objects,
including the central disk of our
Milky Way Galaxy on the left, and the neighboring
Large and
Small Magellanic Cloud galaxies on the right.
A
time-lapse video highlighting
auroras visible that night puts the picturesque scene in context.
Why the sky did not
also glow green remains
unknown.
Authors & editors:
Robert Nemiroff
(MTU) &
Jerry Bonnell
(USRA)
NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings,
and Disclaimers
NASA Official: Jay Norris.
Specific
rights apply.
A service of:
LHEA at
NASA /
GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
