Archive for October 17th, 2012

The Science Behind Those Eye-Popping Northern Lights

Northern night skies have recently been alive with light. Those shimmering curtains get their start about 93 million miles away, on the sun. An aurora borealis (aurora australis in the Southern Hemisphere) is precipitated by explosions on the surface of the sun, sometimes starting as solar flares, said Robert Nemiroff, an astrophysicist at Michigan Technological […]