Thanks to a quintet of satellites and a backup posse of ground-based telescopes, researchers have gotten their best look ever at how auroras--also known as the southern and northern lights--begin to form in space. The dazzling light displays are provoked by "space tornadoes," researchers say.
Whirling at more than a million miles per hour, these invisible, funnel-shaped solar windstorms carry electrical currents of more than a hundred thousand amps—roughly ten times that of an average lightning strike—scientists announced.... And they're huge: up to 44,000 miles (70,000 kilometers) long and wide enough to envelop Earth [National Geographic News].
The observations were made as part of NASA’s THEMIS mission, which uses the satellites and telescopes to study how solar winds, the charged particles that stream from the sun, interact with the Earth's magnetic field.
On the Earth's dark side, the solar wind stretches out the field, forming a region known as the ...
