Auroras glow when solar wind hits Earth’s magnetic field
Charged particles streaming from the Sun slam into Earth’s magnetic shield and rain down near the poles, exciting oxygen and nitrogen until the sky paints green, red, and purple curtains.
Without that magnetic field, more of the solar wind would scour the upper atmosphere. Auroras are the visible spark of a quiet daily battle between star and planet.
People chase them as beauty; physicists read them as space weather. Both are right — the glow is a live dashboard of how our planet stays wrapped in a protective bubble.
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