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By David Freeman
The dragons may be imaginary, but a dragon-shaped aurora borealis that wavered in Iceland's sky this month was breathtaking – take a look at this spectacular picture.
The photo, taken by Jingyi Zhang on February 6, became NASA's astronomical photo of the day on February 18 and has been widely viewed online since. It represents a swirling green dawn over a dark, snow-covered landscape where a lonely figure – the photographer's mother – stares at the sky as if she is amazed.
An aurora borealis is formed when charged particles in rapid movement of the sun strike the Earth 's magnetic field, colliding with atoms and molecules of oxygen and nitrogen located in the Earth' s upper atmosphere. exciting and causing them to release light particles called photons.
Because these collisions are concentrated by the Earth's magnetic field at the North and South poles, they are most often observed at high north and south latitudes. In the northern hemisphere, they are called aurora borealis or aurora borealis; in the southern hemisphere, they are called aurora australis or southern lights.
Auroras tend to be green, like dragon-shaped ones, but they can also be shades of red, blue, purple, pink, and white. They are too weak to be seen in broad daylight. At night, some are quite dark, but others are bright enough to read.
And if the auroras can be beautiful, the so-called solar storms that trigger them can disrupt radio transmissions on Earth and satellite operations in space. "So solar storms can benefit the northern lights … but they hurt some types of long-distance communications," said Jay Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., In an email.
Auroras have also been observed on other planets, including Jupiter and Saturn.
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