Colliding Aurora

Aurora borealis, or the Northern Lights, can sometimes collide producing spectacular displays of light according to NASA which deployed cameras around the Arctic to catch the phenomenon. “’Our jaws dropped when we saw the movies for the first time,’ said space scientist Larry Lyons of the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), a member of the team that made the discovery. ‘These outbursts are telling us something very fundamental about the nature of auroras.’ The collisions occur on such a vast scale that isolated observers on Earth — with limited fields of view — had never noticed them before. It took a network of sensitive cameras spread across thousands of miles to get the big picture. NASA and the Canadian Space Agency created such a network for THEMIS, short for ‘Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms.’”