Who is Aurora Borealis?

Aurora Borealis is a dance of lights that happens up high in the sky, usually near the North Pole.

Imagine you're playing with a toy that has tiny colorful balls inside, when you shake it, the colors light up and move around. That's kind of what happens with Aurora Borealis, but way bigger! It’s like nature is shaking its toy, and the lights are the colorful balls moving in the sky.

Up high, there are invisible particles from the sun that zoom through space, they're called solar winds. When these fast-moving particles meet the air up near the top of Earth’s atmosphere, they bump into each other and make light.

It's like when you run into a friend on the playground, you both stop for a second and then laugh. The particles also "laugh" by making colors, which we see as shimmering lights in the sky.

Sometimes it looks like waves or ribbons of green, pink, or purple, just like how water moves when you drop a stone into a pond!

The Earth is like a giant magnet. The solar winds are drawn to the north and south poles, where the magnetic pull is strongest, that’s why we usually see these lights up north!