The Magic of the Northern Lights
When I think of the Northern Lights, I think of magic.
I’m not alone in this. For millennia, humans have been gazing up into cloudless nights and assigning fantastical explanations to what Aristotle once described as chasms in the sky.
The Vikings believed the lights were reflections of the Valkyries’ armor as they led fallen warriors to Valhalla. In Finland, the lights are called the “revontulet” or “fire fox,” as they were said to be caused by Arctic foxes running through the sky and leaving sparks in their wake. In Inuit lore, they’re the souls of the dead.
It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century, when Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkeland arrived on the scene, that a more scientific explanation emerged. Birkeland theorized the Aurora Borealis, a name given to the Northern Lights by Galileo in 1619 in honor of the Roman goddess of dawn, were the result of electromagnetic solar winds interacting with Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The Sun is constantly emitting a stream of high energy particles that travel outward at speeds of one million miles per hour—fast enough to escape the Sun’s gravitational pull. When these charged particles (known collectively as solar winds) shower down on the space surrounding Earth, they encounter our magnetosphere, or the magnetic field generated by the planet’s molten iron core as it churns. While many of the Sun’s particles will simply be deflected, intense solar storms such as the one we experienced earlier this month can break through into our atmosphere at the poles, where the magnetosphere is at its weakest.
Once in our atmosphere, the charged solar particles collide with elements like oxygen and nitrogen, creating bursts of energy release that come in the form of light emission. The colors of this light are dictated by a given atom or molecule’s chemical composition and altitude. Oxygen emits yellow-green light that reddens the higher into the atmosphere it goes. Nitrogen usually emits shades of purple and blue. These colors can also morph, creating a mélange of new hues as they meet and blend.
Voila: the Aurora Borealis (Aurora Australis in the south) is born.
(As is too often the case with forward-thinking minds, Kristian Birkeland received primarily derision in his lifetime. His theory about what causes the Northern Lights was only proven correct in 1967—half a century after his death—when a US Navy space probe was finally able to confirm what Birkeland had proposed long before.)
We’ve learned a lot about the lights in the 125 years since Birkeland’s discovery. We know how their density and movement is determined by the composition and currents of our atmosphere. We know they occur on other planets, Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus among them. We know where they’re the most visible (between 60- and 75-degrees latitude) and when (late August to early April). We even have forecasts predicting Aurora activity (check out spaceweather.gov).
There’s not exactly a paucity of science available.
And yet, when I think of the Northern Lights, the first word that comes to mind isn’t electron or magnetosphere or something equally cerebral. It’s magic.
The earliest recordings of the Aurora are cave paintings in southern France dating back to around 30,000 BC, remnants of the very first modern humans who settled in Europe. Whatever corresponding stories these early people told to explain the lights’ existence have been lost to time, but as I look at those squiggly-lined attempts to capture something so numinous that even our most cutting-edge technology can’t fully reproduce the wonder of the real thing, I can’t help but feel that our ancestors understood the Aurora in a way our contemporary knowledge fails to.
While the phenomenon Birkeland described might be accurate, I think it misses a key component: the viewer.
The Northern Lights aren’t just electromagnetic reactions. They’re also the questions we ask ourselves about our place in the universe. They’re the awe and fear they inspire in their beholders, the thread that runs between millennia of humans who all gazed up at a cloudless night sky and breathed, “Wow.” They’re our search for meaning in our lives—meaning that, much like the lights themselves, can be alternatively elusive and profound.
When I watch the Northern Lights—those ancient yet ever-animate chasms undulating across an immense abyss—my own life feels very small. But it’s in the very act of watching them that I find purpose. Which I suppose is a kind of magic in itself.
I’m not alone in this. For millennia, humans have been gazing up into cloudless nights and assigning fantastical explanations to what Aristotle once described as chasms in the sky.
The Vikings believed the lights were reflections of the Valkyries’ armor as they led fallen warriors to Valhalla. In Finland, the lights are called the “revontulet” or “fire fox,” as they were said to be caused by Arctic foxes running through the sky and leaving sparks in their wake. In Inuit lore, they’re the souls of the dead.
It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century, when Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkeland arrived on the scene, that a more scientific explanation emerged. Birkeland theorized the Aurora Borealis, a name given to the Northern Lights by Galileo in 1619 in honor of the Roman goddess of dawn, were the result of electromagnetic solar winds interacting with Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The Sun is constantly emitting a stream of high energy particles that travel outward at speeds of one million miles per hour—fast enough to escape the Sun’s gravitational pull. When these charged particles (known collectively as solar winds) shower down on the space surrounding Earth, they encounter our magnetosphere, or the magnetic field generated by the planet’s molten iron core as it churns. While many of the Sun’s particles will simply be deflected, intense solar storms such as the one we experienced earlier this month can break through into our atmosphere at the poles, where the magnetosphere is at its weakest.
Once in our atmosphere, the charged solar particles collide with elements like oxygen and nitrogen, creating bursts of energy release that come in the form of light emission. The colors of this light are dictated by a given atom or molecule’s chemical composition and altitude. Oxygen emits yellow-green light that reddens the higher into the atmosphere it goes. Nitrogen usually emits shades of purple and blue. These colors can also morph, creating a mélange of new hues as they meet and blend.
Voila: the Aurora Borealis (Aurora Australis in the south) is born.
(As is too often the case with forward-thinking minds, Kristian Birkeland received primarily derision in his lifetime. His theory about what causes the Northern Lights was only proven correct in 1967—half a century after his death—when a US Navy space probe was finally able to confirm what Birkeland had proposed long before.)
We’ve learned a lot about the lights in the 125 years since Birkeland’s discovery. We know how their density and movement is determined by the composition and currents of our atmosphere. We know they occur on other planets, Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus among them. We know where they’re the most visible (between 60- and 75-degrees latitude) and when (late August to early April). We even have forecasts predicting Aurora activity (check out spaceweather.gov).
There’s not exactly a paucity of science available.
And yet, when I think of the Northern Lights, the first word that comes to mind isn’t electron or magnetosphere or something equally cerebral. It’s magic.
The earliest recordings of the Aurora are cave paintings in southern France dating back to around 30,000 BC, remnants of the very first modern humans who settled in Europe. Whatever corresponding stories these early people told to explain the lights’ existence have been lost to time, but as I look at those squiggly-lined attempts to capture something so numinous that even our most cutting-edge technology can’t fully reproduce the wonder of the real thing, I can’t help but feel that our ancestors understood the Aurora in a way our contemporary knowledge fails to.
While the phenomenon Birkeland described might be accurate, I think it misses a key component: the viewer.
The Northern Lights aren’t just electromagnetic reactions. They’re also the questions we ask ourselves about our place in the universe. They’re the awe and fear they inspire in their beholders, the thread that runs between millennia of humans who all gazed up at a cloudless night sky and breathed, “Wow.” They’re our search for meaning in our lives—meaning that, much like the lights themselves, can be alternatively elusive and profound.
When I watch the Northern Lights—those ancient yet ever-animate chasms undulating across an immense abyss—my own life feels very small. But it’s in the very act of watching them that I find purpose. Which I suppose is a kind of magic in itself.