Russian cosmonaut Iván Vagnér, who is now on the International Space Station (ISS), managed to capture on video the peak of the northern lights as it passed over Antarctica and Australia. The images have been shared on social networks this Wednesday by Vagnér, who assures that five unidentified flying objects appear in them: “In the video you can see something different, not just the aurora, what do you think they are? Meteors, satellites or ...? ”, Asked the cosmonaut in a tweet.
The aurora borealis is a luminous phenomenon that can only be observed near the magnetic poles of our planet. It is produced when the charged particles - protons, electrons and helium nuclei - that make up the solar wind are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field towards the polar regions - there are also southern auroras in the southern hemisphere - where they collide with the upper layers of the atmosphere emitting energy in the form of light, something similar to what happens in a fluorescent tube. It was the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei who christened them the Northern Lights in 1619, borrowing the name from the Greek goddess of dawn, Aurora, and from Boreas, the north wind. The best time to see them runs from October to March, although you never know for sure when or where they will appear.