sublimeruin

So Sunday night the Aurora Borealis could be seen here in illinois. It was absoulutely beautiful. Green, red, yellow, blue and purple lights dancing across the sky. It looked like the sky was on fire in places. I've never had the chance to see them myself before and I am very glad I did. After calling almost everyone I know to tell them and having a few of the Older ones telling me they had never seen them here before. I realized I was seeing something that may be a once-in-a-lifetime chance. So I took full advantage of it.



Now for a little science lesson: The Auroras can be seen when particles from the sun hits the earths magnetosphere(a big magnetic field the surronds the earth). Every 11 years our Sun goes into a very volitale period of change in which large amounts of energy are released from it. Imagine the sun is a giant rubber band ball....and every so often one of the rubber band gets streched to far and breaks...when this happens a solar flare happens. These solar flares travel through space and bombard the planets with raditation and solar particles. Usually these Northern Lights are only seen in Alaska and Canada here in north america sometimes as south as northern michigan and wisconsin. A rather large band known as an X-class band or "solar flare" came from the earth on Nov 7th cause the lights alot of us saw last night.

Now if you made it through all that...what that means for us. Everytime we see the lights it is because our earths magnetic field and ozone layer are trying to disipate the extra raditation and energy. With a dose as large as the one we received they may be some adverse effects. One possible affect is that our ozone layer will be weakened by the bombardment meaning that the suns normally mostly harmless UV rays would more easily affect us, meaning that we may experience things such as sun burns even though it is 40 degrees in most areas here. However it is too soon to tell what effect if any this latest solar flare will have.

And now you know......