A giant green dragon spread its webbed wings in the sky over Iceland. It might have been thought that this is a picture from the announcement of the final season of “Games of Thrones” – but in fact it is the aurora, Sun that bombards the Earth with streams of charged particles.
And although many of us would prefer to see a living dragon breathing a flame in the sky over Iceland, NASA, as usual, offers a much more prosaic version of the origin of this scenic atmospheric phenomenon – the increased activity of the Sun.
Auroras are observed when some of the many lines of the Sun’s magnetic field intertwine and explode, forming sunspots. Charged particles escape from these spots and move with the solar wind into space. If on the path of these flows will be the Earth, then the particles crash into the magnetic field of our planet and pass through the atmosphere near the poles. On the way to the surface of the planet, these particles interact with molecules of oxygen, nitrogen and other atmospheric gases, forming a bright glow of the sky, called the aurora.
And although usually the aurora is not considered something out of the ordinary, NASA notes that this Icelandic dragon appeared at a rather unexpected time.
So far, no sunspots were recorded in February, so the auroras lasting several days this month came as a surprise to us.
-NASA representatives pointed out in comments to this amazing picture
Photographers Jingyi Zhang and Wang Zheng were also surprised by the fabulous monster that appeared in the sky over Iceland. According to NASA, Zhang’s mother was so shocked by what she saw that she ran out into the street along with the photographers (and got straight into the frame).
Dragon shaped aurora appears in the skies over Iceland
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