Monday, May 28, 2012

Observation 4.3: Astronomy Cast Episode 163


The topic of this episode was the Aurora. The first topic of discussion was the visual aspect of the aurora. The reason we see the aurora is because of Earth's magnetic field. They expressed Earth as basically a bar magnet with looping magnetic field lines. Atomic oxygen is found in the upper atmosphere where it is closer to the suns radiation. This makes the atmosphere extremely radioactive, giving the ability to corrode most metals. Because of the way they are created, we are now able to predict these aurora with greater and greater accuracy. 

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