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Did you know, the Northern lights or Aurora Borealis are created when the mythical Finnish ‘Firefox’ runs so quickly across the snow that its tail causes sparks to fly into the night sky? At least, that’s one of the stories that has been told in Finland about this beautiful phenomenon. Another that we love comes from the Sámi people of Finnish Lapland (among others), who describe them as plumes of water ejected by whales.

What do they look like, to you?

Today’s scientific explanation for the origin of the Aurora wasn’t thought up until the 20^th Century, by the Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland. Charged particles, electrons and protons, are constantly emitted by the Sun, making up the solar wind. This wind slams into Earth’s ionosphere – sometimes sped up to vast speeds by solar storms – and the charged particles are deflected towards the poles by the magnetosphere.

Molecules in our atmosphere then absorb energy from these charged particles from the Sun, and re-release it in their own unique set of colours. Oxygen produces green, but at high altitudes can create red, nitrogen creates blues, and colours can overlap creating purple. Waves, twists and streams are caused by variations in Earth’s magnetic fields.

This striking video shows the Aurora over Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden. It’s composed of images taken by the Kiruna all-sky camera every minute for about ten hours over 18-19 September 2023.

The all-sky auroral camera is operated by the Kiruna Atmospheric and Geophysical Observatory (KAGO) within the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF), and data from here is provided as part of ESA’s network of space weather services within the Agency’s Space Safety Programme.

Recently, a sequence of multiple coronal mass ejections – large, sudden ejections of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun – struck Earth and we are still recovering from the passage of the last one. The fastest was travelling at around 700 km/s, considered a small event.

The Sun is getting close to its time of peak solar activity – predicted for 2024/2025 – in its current 11-year cycle, Solar Cycle 25. Solar storms are causing an increase in geomagnetic activity; temporary disturbances in Earth’s magnetosphere, which has led to increased light shows at Earth’s poles.

A modern interpretation of the meaning of the Aurora could focus on Earth’s remarkable way of protecting life, so far, the only life we know of in the Universe. The colours of the Aurora reveal the normally invisible complex molecular soup in just the right composition for life to thrive. Those molecules form our atmosphere, a thin shield against electromagnetic radiation and even the small asteroids that constantly bombard our home.

The shapes of the Aurora tell the story of the usually invisible protective magnetic field, holding back dangerous elements from reaching us on the ground, like charged particles from the Sun. It also pulls every compass needle north, helping us navigate stormy seas.

While humans on Earth are protected by Earth’s magnetic field, space weather can have an extreme and disruptive impact on satellites in orbit and infrastructure on Earth, and ultimately our society. For this reason, ESA’s Space Weather Service Network continues to monitor our star and the conditions around Earth, to provide information to keep our systems safe.

In 2030, ESA will launch the first-of-its-kind Vigil mission to monitor the Sun from a unique vantage point. Studying our star from the side, it will provide a stream of data that will warn of potentially hazardous regions before they roll into view from Earth.

Find out more about space weather and sign up for free updates from ESA’s Space Weather Service Network.

The successful last Ariane 6 launch system combined tests HFT-3, at the German Aerospace Center in Lampoldshausen; and CTLO1-C, at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, show the strength of European industrial and institutional collaboration. The “Space Team Europe” gets one step closer to the Ariane 6 first flight.

On 1 June 2022, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft was turned slightly and rolled to one side, so that the Metis instrument could see the part of the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona, through which NASA’s Parker Solar Probe was flying. This manoeuvre meant that for the first time, solar physicists recorded both the in-situ behaviour of the magnetised gas known as plasma that constitutes the solar corona, and the large-scale consequences.

These plots show the movement of Parker Solar Probe through the Metis field of view. A real image from Metis is shown. The fuzzy red disc is a result of the coronagraph that blocks the glare of the bright Sun to enable observations of the fainter corona. The black disc is a mask to compress the image size to reduce the amount of unnecessary data downlinked. The cross marks the centre of the Sun, and the small circle around the cross represents the outline of the Sun itself. The Parker Solar Probe icon is not to scale.

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Discover ESA Live is an “all-year” live streaming service intended to disseminate ESA's activities through interactive streaming sessions and gamified e-learning modules. 

Scientists have used the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) in a new mode of operation to record part of the Sun’s atmosphere that has been almost impossible to image until now. By covering the Sun’s bright disc with an ‘occulter’ inside the instrument, EUI can detect the million-times fainter ultraviolet light coming from the surrounding corona.

This movie shows an ultraviolet image of the Sun’s corona taken using the EUI occulter. An ultraviolet image of the Sun’s disc has been superimposed in the middle, in the area left blank by the occulter. The image of the Sun’s disc has been taken by NASA’s STEREO mission, which happened to be looking at the Sun from almost the same direction as Solar Orbiter at the same time, so the features on the surface have a good correlation to the features in the corona.

The grid pattern is an artifact caused by the mesh that is holding the 150 nm thick front-filter. It is invisible in regular images but present (as expected) in occulter mode. The 'WOW-enhanced’ label next to the time counter in the lower left corner stands for the ‘Wavelets Optimized Whitening’ algorithm which enhances the visual appearance of the movie. 

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visits European Astronaut Centre on 1 September 2023.