The northern lights happen because charged particles from the Sun crash into gases high in Earth’s atmosphere and make them glow, mainly near the magnetic poles where Earth’s magnetic field guides those particles.

What the northern lights are

  • The northern lights are a type of aurora called aurora borealis, seen in the northern hemisphere; in the south they are called aurora australis.
  • They appear as shimmering curtains, arcs, and waves of colored light, usually green but sometimes red, purple, or blue, stretching across the night sky.

How the Sun creates them

  • The Sun constantly throws out a stream of charged particles called the solar wind, and during solar storms or eruptions it can blast out especially dense clouds of particles.
  • Some of these particles travel millions of miles and reach Earth, carrying energy that can interact with our planet’s magnetic field and upper atmosphere.

Role of Earth’s magnetic field

  • Earth’s magnetic field deflects most incoming particles, but it funnels a fraction of them down toward the polar regions along magnetic field lines.
  • Because of this guiding effect, the collisions that create auroras mostly happen in oval-shaped zones around the magnetic poles, which is why the lights are common in high-latitude places like northern Norway, Iceland, and Canada.

Why they glow in colors

  • When the incoming particles slam into atoms and molecules of oxygen and nitrogen high in the atmosphere, they “excite” them—give them extra energy—so those gases release that energy again as light.
  • Different gases and altitudes produce different colors: oxygen tends to give green and red light, while nitrogen can produce purples and blues, combining into the multicolored displays people see.

Why they’ve been so talked about lately

  • Northern lights have been more widely reported in recent years because the Sun is near the “maximum” of its roughly 11‑year activity cycle, when sunspots and solar storms become more frequent and intense.
  • Stronger and more frequent solar eruptions send extra charged particles toward Earth, making auroras brighter and sometimes visible much farther from the poles than usual, which drives a lot of current news and social media discussion.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.