Scientists Discover The Cause Of Why The Northern and Southern Auroral Lights Differ.

Auroras are beautiful phenomenon and you have to see the to really appreciate them. I am one lucky guys to have seen both the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights. For some reason, I think Northern lights have character and the beauty.  These lights are caused when the solar wind, which carries charged particles and plasma from the Sun, slams into Earth’s magnetosphere. Solar particles are funneled into Earth’s magnetic field lines, which run from pole to pole, until they run out of energy in the atmosphere. The precipitation and ionization of these particles prompts atmospheric molecules to emit the colorful lights often seen in polar night skies.
For a long time people assumed that these auroral light shows  in the North and the South were mirror images of each other. But all that changed when NASA satellite imagery published in a 2009 Nature paper revealed that the poles could express different auroral intensity patterns.

Now a group of scientists, laboring over 10 years on the question why these aurora are different, researchers led by Anders Ohma, a graduate student at the University of Bergen in Norway, think the answer could be the tilted pressure that the solar wind exerts on Earth’s magnetic field.