"We discovered what makes the Northern Lights dance," Dr. Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Los Angeles is quoted as having said in this NASA press release. David Sibeck, THEMIS project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. explains "As they capture and store energy from the solar wind, the Earth's magnetic field lines stretch far out into space. Magnetic reconnection releases the energy stored within these stretched magnetic field lines, flinging charged particles back toward the Earth's atmosphere," and that "They create halos of shimmering aurora circling the northern and southern poles." Using five THEMIS satellites and 20 ground observatories located throughout Canada and Alaska, scientists directly observed the beginning of substorms . Regardless of how they are formed, I've witnessed them many times and they are spectacular, definitely something that everyone should experience at least once!
