Brown Dwarf Boasts Brightest Auroras Ever Seen [Slide Show]
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EARTH Earth's magnetic field funnels particles carried in solar wind and huge solar eruptions called coronal mass ejections toward its north and south poles, producing the auroras borealis and australis (the northern and southern Lights, respectively)... Credit: NASA
MARS The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter first detected auroras on the Red Planet in 2005. Unlike Earth, Mars no longer has a global magnetic field. But it did for a brief window of time more than four billion years ago... Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH
SATURN Charged solar wind particles collide with hydrogen atoms and molecules in Saturn's atmosphere, giving off ultraviolet light. We can only observe this auroral light show using telescopes and spacecraft... Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Clarke (Boston University), and Z. Levay (STScI)
JUPITER Jupiter's ever-present auroras, powered by the solar wind, are thousands of times brighter than those on Earth. Additionally, Jupiter's interactions with one of its major moons, Io, occasionally cause the planet to flare with particularly luminous auroral storms... Credit: John Clarke, Denis Grodent, ESA, and NASA
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URANUS Here Hubble observations of Uranus's auroras in visible and ultraviolet light are superimposed on photos of the planetary disk taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft during its 1986 flyby. Hubble snapped these pictures in November 2011, during a time of heightened solar activity when a torrent of solar wind particles set the planet alight with auroras... Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Lamy (Observatory of Paris, CNRS, CNES)
BROWN DWARF A team of astronomers recently spotted aurora activity on a brown dwarf dubbed LSR J1835+3259. They observed the auroras using the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, and the Hale Telescope in California... Credit: Chuck Carter and Gregg Hallinan, Caltech
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