How to create your own miniature version of the Northern Lights

Here ’s a fulgurous picture of the Aurora Borealis being simulated on a terrella . A terrella is not much more than a magnet that ’s been chip at into a ball , but it has helped scientists both visualize and prove stage about the Earth and its magnetic field .

The first terrella was cut up back in Elizabethan meter , when people wanted to know what the movement of a magnet on a compass indicated about the Earth . William Gilbert – Royal doctor and earliest know incarnation of Bill Nye the Science Guy – think it was because the Earth was a huge attractor , and made a magnetized mini - Earth to show that he was correct . A reach that moved over the so - hollo terrella travel the way a range did over the Earth’s surface of the Earth .

The pic up top is a recreation of a serial publication of experiments done in the late 1800s and former 1900s , by Kristian Birkeland , essay to explain the phenomenon behind the polar aurora . Birkeland , instead of carving his terrella like a shot out of a attractor , put an electromagnetic helix inside a alloy firmament . He then put the sphere in a vacancy chamber and released a just a bit of gas between it and the metal plates he suspended it between . The gasolene mimicked the Earth ’s atmosphere . When he burgeon forth negatron at the terrella – imitate the solar wind – the charismatic field of the terrella steered the electrons towards the pole , where they excited the gas molecules until they glowed . Anyone could see the similarities between this and the Northern Lights .

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Birkeland tried other experimentation as well , attempting to model phenomena such as sunspots and solar flare , and their effects on Earth . He was not as successful with this as he was with the auroras . When computers came along , no one involve the poor terrella anymore . It ’s still pretty , though .

ViaSphearaandNASA .

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