What Powers the Aurora?The aurora occur during magnetic disturbances that disrupt the Earth's magnetic tail. These disturbances produce explosive energy release and send million-ampere currents shunting through the high latitude upper atmosphere. |
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About the MovieThis is a low resolution exerpt from a model-generated movie showing the disruption of the magnetotail during a magnetic disturbance. What is being displayed is the plasma density. The disruption of the magnetotail sends high velocity particles down through the high latitude atmosphere producing beautiful, active auroral displays. A complete low resolution version of the movie in MPEG (980 kB) format is available as well as a complete high resolution version in MPEG (3.0 Mb) format. The movie was provided courtesy of R. Lopez, C. Goodrich and J. Lyon using facilities at the Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Maryland. |
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