Sun Wind
Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis are mostly a spectacular visual appearance in green or amber up in the polar regions (there are also Southern Lights towards the South Pole, but are not as easily accessible).
While one must be lucky to see Northern Lights on a trip covering parts of Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Finland, or Norway, one must be even luckier to be able to listen to them! It is a mostly unexplained phenomenon, but it is possible, as a team of researchers confirmed and recorded it in 2016.
It has been mused and theorized that the Auroras could also be heard for a long time already. Let us quickly explain what they are:
What is called Solar Wind, and a mass of other particles from outer space, bombard our earth continuously. But since we have the luck to have a magnetic field coming with our planet, these potentially harmful loads don't land on our heads but get swirled around the magnetic poles. Thanks, Mother Earth!
The applied magnetic inter-charge covers all the mysterious and beautiful lights. They even dance, as NASA is telling us! According to the periodical changes in earth's magnetic field, so do the Aurora displays change. They are interlinked.
But for almost centuries, there remained the question, "Can we also hear them?".
As said, "Yes, We Can". Little was known of the composition of the Auroras, so for long times only myths and tales remained. But there was little doubt that they can be listened to, as well.
While mentioned by Galileo in 1619, they have been known forever, have been depicted in cave paintings in 30,000 BC, and were recorded by a Babylonian astronomer around 600 BC.
So finally, in 2016 a team of researchers was able to make recordings using special equipment. It sounds rather eerie, like snaps of a whip, but seems to make sense when one imagines that lightning can also go upwards direction.
Anyway, the acoustic phenomena will happen around seventy meters above our heads, so it is not that farsighted to think of that for the Vikings, they were the shimmering reflections of the armor of the Valkyries sent by Odin to collect the bodies of the warriors slain in battle, while in Finland fire foxes traveled through the sky so quickly that their tails produced sparks as they brushed the mountains.
The skies sound eerie.
By nokturnal