"Roping" the Aurora Borealis

Scientists have new evidence suggesting that the colorful and eerie streams of light known as the Aurora Borealis may result from “magnetic ropes”. It seems that these “magnetic ropes” link the Earth’s upper atmosphere to the sun.

In spring of 2007 a fleet of satellites and ground-based stations (including northern Canadian stations located in Prince George and Whitehorse) caught a powerful space substorm over the northern hemisphere, which revealed something neat about our northern lights. A space substorm is literally a stream of energy from the sun that interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field. University of California researcher, Vassilis Angelopoulos commented that “the auroras surged westward…crossing 15 degrees of longitude in less than one minute. The storm traversed an entire polar time zone, or 400 miles, in 60 seconds flat.” According to CanWest reporter, Randy Boswell (Vancouver Sun, Dec. 12, 2007), researchers had theorized that colossal magnetic columns ran between Earth and the sun, offering a “conduit for energy” that manifests as bursts of northern lights.