We live on a very beautiful planet, no doubt about it, and one of the sights that is worth checking out no matter your age in order to imbue a sense of awe and wonder in you would be the aurora borealis and aurora australis: where they happen to be nighttime light shows that are triggered whenever the Earth’s magnetic field funnels electrons and protons from the sun to polar regions. This process will excite atmospheric gas molecules, resulting in their fluorescent look. What about the Red Planet, Mars? It seems that Mars has their very own version of the northern lights as well, being known as the aurora universalis.
A somewhat similar phenomena has been discovered to happen on Mars as scientists made use of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, where it gathered evidence that an aurora could very well happen across the entire nighttime face of the planet. It might not be the real deal in the image above, but that is actually an artist’s illustration.
The MAVEN spacecraft started to orbit Mars in 2014 in order to peel more layers of mystery on how Mars’ atmosphere ended up being so thin. Well, perhaps tourists to Mars in the years to come will be able to regale us with such tales.
Filed in . Read more about Mars. Source: news.sciencemag.org