Such waves are an essential mechanism for energy transport and momentum in magnetohydrodynamic systems; that is, they have the ability to accelerate particles. This is a cylindrical vacuum chamber 66 feet long 20 meters long and 3. For more news, updates about aurora borealis and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!
Solar eclipse: Rare event takes place in the UK! Should MPs be allowed to do another job? How Christmas can still sparkle with plastic-free glitter. Meet the year-old world record breaking sprinter! Home Menu. Aurora borealis: How northern lights are created has now been discovered.
Getty Images. How are they created? More like this. His theory has now been proven. Recreating the northern lights. Inside the chamber, scientists generated a plasma similar to what exists in space near the Earth. As they began to experience the electrons "surfing" along the wave, they used another specialized instrument to measure how those electrons were gaining energy from the wave. The northern lights appear over a waterfall in Iceland. Although the experiment didn't recreate the colorful shimmer we see in the sky, "our measurements in the laboratory clearly agreed with predictions from computer simulations and mathematical calculations, proving that electrons surfing on Alfven waves can accelerate the electrons up to speeds of 45 million mph that cause the aurora," said Howes.
Auroral beads are seen from the International Space Station. Space scientists around the country were ecstatic to hear the news. It is a very rare thing to see a laboratory experiment that validates a theory or model concerning the space environment," said Patrick Koehn, a scientist in the Heliophysics Division of NASA. The picture up top is a recreation of a series of experiments done in the late s and early s, by Kristian Birkeland, attempting to explain the phenomenon behind the polar aurora.
Birkeland, instead of carving his terrella directly out of a magnet, put an electromagnetic coil inside a metal sphere. He then put the sphere in a vacuum chamber and released a just a bit of gas between it and the metal plates he suspended it between. The gas mimicked the Earth's atmosphere. When he shot electrons at the terrella - imitating the solar wind - the magnetic field of the terrella steered the electrons towards the poles, where they excited the gas molecules until they glowed.
Anyone could see the similarities between this and the Northern Lights. Birkeland tried other experiments as well, attempting to model phenomena such as sunspots and solar flares, and their effects on Earth.
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