The Sun, Earth and Aurora

Okay, here's the sun and the earth, more or less. Take it as the inner picture tube of a television where the picture displayed will be the aurora..

Think about the true size of the sun and the earth, and the distance between them. We can't draw them accurately, because if we showed the earth as a single dot on your computer screen, the sun would be 110 dots wide, and it would be 11,728 dots away from earth! Not too many computer displays will show a picture that is almost 12,000 dots (pixels) wide! Outer space is really big.

In a picture tube, the source of electrons was a hot cathode. The sun is the source of electrons in the auroral display, and it is so hot that atoms and their electrons don't stay together. This condition, called plasma, is often called the fourth state of matter.

 

 

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