Picture of Light1994

Himself - Representative from space:
If you can imagine, a rather spectacular display of lights in the sky, you may have seen the aurora, but try to imagine that from orbit. What the aurora is actually, if you can imagine my hand as the earth, and unfortunately I'm holding my mike button with my other hand so I can't gesture very well. But if you could imagine the earth, surrounded by its magnetic field, that earth orbits in the atmosphere of the sun. Now the upper corona is a supersonic wind that expanding and blows past the earth and the earth is actually in that wind. And that sweeps the magnetic tail... magnetic field around the earth into a long tail, and the residual magnetic field is called the magnetosphere and its called the magnetic tail... and if the magnetic field were visible the earth would look like a tremendous comet with a tail that goes way out past the moon. And as the solar wind sweeps along the sides of this magnetic field, it generates energy that is dumped into the tail. And then every once in a while by some impulsive mechanism that we don't quite understand yet, that energy is dumped down the magnetic field lines into the earth and hits the earth in two circles, one around the north magnetic pole and one around the south magnetic pole and that constitutes the aurora.