NASA explained that an aurora appears as a ring of glowing gases circling a planet's polar region
NASA has released a captivating image of Saturn's Auroras on its Instagram handle. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope snapped a series of photographs of the aurora dancing in the sky. The image was clicked in January 2004.
"The bright auroral display in this image corresponds with the arrival of a large disturbance in the solar wind," the space agency said.
The observations, made by Hubble and the Cassini spacecraft, while en route to the planet, suggest that Saturn's auroral storms are driven mainly by the pressure of the solar wind - a stream of charged particles from the Sun - rather than by the Sun's magnetic field, NASA explained in a release.
In the caption, the space agency wrote, "Hubble's unique ultraviolet view of Saturn's aurorae helped show that these storms are driven mainly by the pressure of the solar wind, which is a stream of charged particles from the Sun. Taken in January 2004, the bright auroral display in this image corresponds with the arrival of a large disturbance in the solar wind."
"Earth's aurorae often last minutes or hours, while Saturn's can last for days," it said.
See the post here:
NASA explained that an aurora appears as a ring of glowing gases circling a planet's polar region. Auroral displays are initiated when charged particles in space collide with a planet's magnetic field. The charged particles are accelerated to high energies and stream into the upper atmosphere. Collisions with the gases in the planet's atmosphere produce flashes of glowing energy in the form of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light.
The ultraviolet images were taken on Jan. 24, 26, and 28, 2004 by Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph.
The internet users loved Saturn's auroras, so far, the post has amassed nearly 2 lakh likes on Instagram.
On Earth, the best places to view this stunning natural phenomenon would be locations like Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and other places.