Stuff You Should Know - How the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis Work

Episode Date: May 18, 2017

It wasn't too long ago that humans thought the polar lights were signs from the afterlife. Thanks to a 19th century Norwegian, we now understand that they are a fascinating interplay with Earth's magnetic field and wind from the sun. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there.

So this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. We want to give, before we get started, a big congratulations to our newest colleagues, Emily and Bridget, with the official relaunch of Stuff Mom Never Told You. Yeah, Chuck, they just debuted last week, I believe, and they come out Wednesdays and Fridays, huh? Yeah, so Monday, Tuesday, well,

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, the four of us have you covered. Yeah, that's true. Do we have any shows that come out on Monday? We do? All right, well, Jerry's nodding, so that means we've got you covered every day of the week. Let's just say that.

Nice. That's how Stuff Works works, way. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, just congratulations to them. That's awesome. I know that they've been running classic episodes while they were down and getting restarted, and it's no small thing to come in and take a show over,

but they're doing an awesome job and are both great broadcasters and, you know, I'm in support of them. Yeah, how's that? That's my official position. I know, that sounded weirdly political. Yeah, good luck and best wishes to Bridget and Emily, so you guys go check it out Wednesdays and Fridays.

Anywhere you get podcasts, you can get Stuff Mom Never Told You. Yes, and apologize, I apologize for my voice. Oh yeah, what's up with your voice? Man, I've just had this upper respiratory thing that won't go away. No, that stinks. And so, unless I'm constantly wetting my throat,

it gets weirdly deep and cracky. Mm-hmm, so are you peeing a lot more than usual? Well, I'm drinking a lot of water, I'm peeing a lot, but I would literally have to drink between every sentence to keep it silky smooth. So, do you want to record today? No, I'm fine, I'm not in pain, but I just don't want anyone's ears to be in pain.

Have you heard of, oh man, now that I say it, I realize I don't know the name of the brand, but you know those like cough drops that are actually like candy, but they market them as cough drops? The cherry flavored ones? Ricolas? Mm-mm.

No, I mean like they're literal candy. Jelly Ranchers? No, but it's basically the most delicious jelly rancher you've ever had. It lacks the sour, it's all sweet. Oh, so it's green apple. No, they're red. I can't remember what they're called,

people are screaming at their... Yeah. Well, they're phones, they're tablets, they're computers right now. Settle down, everybody. Yes, Chuck and I agree with you, this is maybe the worst intro we've ever done. Jerry does too.

So, let's get to it, shall we? Yes. So, we're talking auroras today. Yeah, and generally we're talking about the two most famous auroras, and I say two because I don't even want to give, I don't want to short change the aurora australis.

No, it definitely does get short changed though. Totally. Did you come upon why? I came upon the explanation a couple of times. Oh, about why? Yeah. I didn't, but I'm gonna have a guess. Okay, let's have it.

Is it not quite as magnificent? Nope. Are there not as many people there? Yes. Ah, okay, there you go. There are fewer, there's less land around the south pole as there is around the north pole. I should say the magnetic south and north pole.

Sure. So, there's fewer eyes to see it. So, the grandeur of it is less obvious to as many people. But yeah, that's why the northern lights get all the top billing. Plus, no one ever named a strain of weed after the aurora australis. I thought about that too.

Southern lights, what is that? Oh, I bet you there's one. There's a, boy, isn't there like a head shop in Atlanta called Southern Lights? I think it's a bookstore. Oh, got it, wink, wink. Oh yeah, where you can buy Russian spice. Books.

Well, I don't understand. I'm just kidding. I see. Is that like a code for something? Well, I thought you were giving me the code. Like they sell books, Chuck. I think it's a real bookstore. Gardening books.

Oh, this is the most confused I've ever been on this show. Like we're on a cell phone and have to keep things, you know. Straight up. All right. All right. Let's get back to it. I don't want to confuse you. So, auroras.

Why are you saying that like that? Because I want to make sure that you comes through. Oh, okay. There are two, and Chuck, apparently until very recently, it was assumed because people couldn't see them at the same time. But it was assumed that the northern lights that you were seeing, the aurora borealis,

if you could simultaneously see the aurora australis, you would be seeing a mirror image of one another. And they recently found out that that's absolutely not true at all. They finally got someone down there to look. Some poor sap had to run. Right. He's like, no, it's way too different.

It's not the same. I don't exactly know how they do it. They must have observed it from space, but they saw, they are convinced now that it's not a mirror image any longer. But this is, it's not that surprising that they're just now kind of figuring that out because it wasn't until too terribly long ago

that people thought the aurora was things like a giant campfire on the other side of the ocean being reflected in the sky or, you know, like the sun's rays peeking up from under the earth where it was day when it was night where you were. There've been a lot of explanations, some of them goofier than others. But it wasn't until I think the 19th century

that we really figured out what was going on. And it was a dude in Norway appropriately enough because Norway's a good place to see the northern lights. Yeah, I mean, they've been around obviously since there have been people to watch them, since ancient times, people have been observing them. But like you said, when, you know, when you're talking about indigenous peoples

and Vikings and things, they're gonna have, you know, they had a more limited understanding of science. So they had all these fanciful descriptions of what they might be. But are you talking about the first person to use the term? Are you talking about? No, actually, I jumped past him and he definitely deserves pop.

So let's talk about him. Yeah, Pierre Gassendi. Or Galileo. And Galileo Galilei. Apparently at the same, around the same time, both witnessed the September 12th, 1961 display and both kind of, you know, put it in their own words, how wonderful it was.

But it wasn't until, I believe you were talking about 1895, a physicist named Christian Birkeland in Norway. Yeah, I think it was 1661. What'd I say? 1961. Oh man, it was 1621. Yeah, okay. And they saw it on, yeah, they saw it on the same night, right?

And they both went out. And I don't think they were having a conversation. And then both ran out to write it down. It seems like they simultaneously came up with this idea at the same time from seeing it on the same date. Is that correct? Yeah, I think they both saw the same fantastic display on the same night.

But they both came up with the same idea to name it Aurora Borealis? Oh, well, that I don't know. It just says they share the credit, which to me means they probably don't know. Right. And would just feel bad giving it to one of them. Yeah, because history's riddled with that kind of thing

where everybody says, oh no, it was really Alexander Graham Bell and Elijah Gray. There's definitely no winner in that. Or maybe one of them said, I say Aurora, you say, and he went Borealis. And they had got a little chant going. It was like a Beastie Boys concert. Yeah, exactly.

So it was that the, what was the Norwegian scientist? Christian Birkeland. So they were already called the Northern Lights from at least the Renaissance on. Or I guess that would be pre-Renaissance. Didn't Galileo help kick off the Renaissance? I think he cut the ribbon. So Christian Birkeland, he was the one who,

he came up with the modern interpretation of what auroras are. Yeah, he was pretty right too. I agree. Like, I don't know if he just pulled this one out of his hat or what, but he definitely, he decided that what the aurora, auroras are, aurorae, apparently, you put a A-E on the end

and that's how you pluralize it. Sure. When he figured out that they have something to do with electrons in outer space interacting with the magnetosphere around Earth. Yeah. And it turns out he was absolutely right. Yeah, he recreated this in a vacuum chamber successfully,

but he wasn't 100% right. He, I think he said that, and we'll get to this later, but the aurora borealis and auroras in general have a characteristic shape, which is an oval ring. And he did not know this at the time because he thought that these electrons were coming from the sun, which is not quite true. No, no, it's not.

It's a little more complex than that. Like, his interpretation of the whole thing was pretty, seemed to be correct, and you actually run into it here there. I saw it on a couple of pretty respectable sites that were basically giving the Birkeland interpretation of aurora phenomenon, but it turns out there's an extra step in there that he didn't account for.

Yeah. So, do you wanna talk about the magnetosphere real quick? Well, I think quickly, though, we should shout out one more researcher. Okay. And this was 1964. There was a grad student in Japan named, well, you always take our Japanese.

You wanna do that one? Shunichi Akasofu. Very nice. Thank you. And he, actually, in 1964, saw these photos, examined them closely, and noticed that they were rings. And I believe that he was the first one to say,

hey, these things are oval. I think he actually predicted them that they would be oval mathematically without even observing them. Oh, and then it's all the... Well. Then once we started going into space and looking at things from satellites,

they said, yep, Akasofu was right. Through math, dude. Yeah. He was like, nope, it'll be a ring. And it turns out he's right. And so what you're seeing with the northern lights and the southern lights are actually connections toward ovals that go around the north pole

and the south pole. Correct. And what it is, again, it's particles, highly charged particles from outer space interacting with the magnetosphere. Yeah. So you ready to talk about the magnetosphere? Sure.

So this is kind of astounding to me. We're not entirely certain why the Earth has a magnetic field from what I can tell. Did you know that? Yeah, I mean, they have their idea, but yeah, they're not positive. Right, that astounds me. Supposedly from the rotation of molten iron

in the outer core inside the Earth, that generates this electrical field that surrounds the Earth, the magnetosphere. Yeah. That's the current hypothesis. It's probably right, but the fact that we don't know exactly what creates the magnetosphere around the Earth is just weird to me.

Yeah. I'm with you there. So with this, whatever is causing it, we know that there's a magnetic shield basically around Earth that is probably caused by that iron rotating inside the Earth. And this magnetic shield has helped preserve Earth. Like we would not be here if the magnetosphere wasn't there.

The atmosphere probably wouldn't be around Earth if the magnetosphere wasn't there. It protects us from bursts of radiation of highly charged ions and particles that are blasted out from the sun and are just traveling throughout the solar system from other stars. And we're bombarded.

Earth is bombarded by this stuff constantly. And the magnetosphere acts to actually deflect most of it, a lot of it. Well, there's your why. I think you meant how. Because we need it, right? We need the magnetosphere. We do. So we've got this thing surrounding us

and it's great, it keeps us alive, but it also creates the basis for aurora, aurorae. Yes. All right, so how this happens, it sounds kind of complicated, but it's really not when you look at it. Like you said, the sun is like this big ball of gas that constantly spits out and burps out

all kinds of things in the form of energy and radiation and what's called solar wind, solar flares, coronal mass ejections. And we talked about all of this in various episodes, but notably our terrible episode on the sun, our legendary episode. Anything that has anything remotely to do with the sun is usually a poor episode for us.

And like you said, most of the time these things get deflected, but sometimes some of the stuff gets trapped in the magnetosphere. Right, or so this stuff that's being spit out from the sun, it's a lot of it's plasma, right? Which is the fourth state of matter. And that's like highly charged particles that hit the magnetosphere.

And when they hit the magnetosphere, they basically transfer their current to the magnetosphere. They produce an electrical charge in it. That's right. And all kinds of fun stuff happens once that happens. And so, well this is where the Birkeland interpretation basically kind of starts to diverge, right? So Birkeland's idea was those particles travel

through the magnetosphere down the field lines of the Earth's magnetic field. And they directly create the aurora. Yeah, like if you could see the magnetic field around the Earth, it would have a big long, wispy tail, sort of like a comet surrounding the Earth. And these magnetic lines, it travels

once it hits those field lines. It goes along that path on the Northern and Southern poles. Right, so. Like down that tail. And if you, so the reason that it has that tail on the one side, it's squished. And it's about six to eight Earth radii outside of the Earth in between the Earth and the Sun.

But it's being pressed up against the Earth, right? So it's being squished on the Sun side. On the night side, that tail is being formed. And apparently that's extraordinarily long. It goes well, well past the Moon. Something like up to a thousand Earth radii past the Earth on the other side, right? But if there wasn't solar wind

and the Earth's magnetosphere just formed, I think it's natural shape, and there was no pressure from the solar wind on it, what you would see if you were looking at it from outer space is, so the Earth is a dipole magnet. You've got the positive and the negative, one on each pole, right? Yep.

It would look like the Earth's magnetosphere would look like an eight on its side. So where the top of the eight was coming off the left side of the Earth and the bottom of the eighth would be coming off of the right side of the Earth. And where they came together would be Earth's magnetic poles. And where the magnetosphere comes in contact with the Earth

at the poles are what are called the polar cusps. And apparently this is basically a direct pipeline, a funnel for particles to go right toward the poles. And that's why particles tend to accumulate or the northern lights tend to accumulate and be seen every night at those poles in rings, because they're being funneled there by the magnetosphere. Yeah, it's like when in the original Star Wars,

A New Hope, when Luke fires at the end toward the Death Star and it gets sucked in that little hole, that's like the polar cusp of the Death Star. That is a great analogy. So let's take a break, shall we? I'm hanging on here by my fingernails and I need to regain myself. I think they call this a cliffhanger.

Yeah. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye, listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So we're back to describe the second part of how this works. Yes. And more.

So when this charge is cutting across this magnetic field, following those lines toward the, uh, it's actually called the magnet, magnetotail. I can't believe they actually named it that. It's pretty great. Yeah. Uh, and like you said from the beginning, it generates this electric current and as it goes, it generates more and more current. It's just sort of building up current until it hits the ionosphere.

Right. So here's this really important step, right? And Berkeley knew this. He, he guessed this, but he will, we'll explain what he got wrong after we explained what's right. How about that? Yes. So when, um, these particles charge, uh, the magnetosphere, there's particles that are

already trapped in the, the, uh, magnetosphere already, right? Yeah. And when solar winds and plasma and these highly charged particles hit the magnetosphere and electrify it, it kind of shakes loose these trapped particles, right? Yeah. Well, these trapped particles are ions, meaning they have either an extra electron or their missing an electron, but either way they're not neutral. They have a charge positive or negative charge and those things go careening through the

magnetosphere toward earth down through the atmosphere. And when they hit the atmosphere, they start interacting with some of the atoms and molecules, specifically oxygen and nitrogen in the earth's atmosphere. And when they do baby, they release photons. That's right. And that, uh, that outer region, the ionosphere is where most of that oxygen and nitrogen is. And, uh, you, you're right. They get together and have a little bit of a party.

They exchange some energy with one another, uh, get to know one another a little bit. And that absorption of energy by the oxygen and nitrogen ions, it gets those electrons. It gets their electrons excited. Right. So the, the, um, oxygen and nitrogen, they have like, uh, they have electrons orbiting them, right? And, but they're just in this low level orbit. It's like a whatever kind of energy, right?

It's a, it's a party that hasn't started yet. It is. This is kind of hanging out. Maybe the pizza hasn't arrived yet. Um, that's kind of thing. So the, when the, uh, when the ions arrive though, they're bringing the pizza and then some, they're bringing the northern lights with them, right? Um, and they, they, uh, get the party started.

Those electrons in the lower orbit suddenly move up to a larger orbit further out. And when that happens, energy has been gained, right? Yeah. That's called a high energy orbital. Okay. So when that happens, it's basically destined to come back to its lower energy orbit, right? The party's got to end at some point. Exactly.

Get tired. They, they, they need to go home. The sun's coming up, that kind of thing. So either by a changes in the vacuum state or because of the, um, application of an external electrical field that orbit, that electron goes back to its original lower orbit. And when it does, since it's gained energy and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, um, that has to go somewhere and it goes somewhere by the production or the emission, I should say, of a photon, a packet of light.

So light is emitted when that electron goes back down to its lower orbit after the party's over. That's right. And because oxygen, ions radiate red and yellow light, nitrogen, ions radiate red, blue and violet light, depending on where you are, this can happen at different, I guess, different altitudes, blue and violet, generally less than 72 miles, 120 kilometers. Green is going to be 72 to 108 miles, 120 to 180 kilometers, and then red more than 108 miles, which is about 180 kilometers. So that accounts for the different colors.

If you look up, or if you've ever been lucky enough to see one of the auroras, either the Australia or Borealis, you're going to see, my favorite is the green, but you're going to see all kinds of blue, green, violet and red lights. Well, and apparently the green just confounded scientists because they're like, wait, so yeah, oxygen radiates red and yellow light. That's great. Nitrogen is red, blue and violet. Got that. But where's this green coming from? They couldn't link it to any particular atom or molecule.

And then they realized that it has to do with the rarefied air in the upper, upper atmosphere that the conditions found up there are not going to be found anywhere else on earth. And that it's actually, it is oxygen atoms and oxygen molecules producing the green. You just wouldn't see it anywhere else, but specifically up in the upper atmosphere. Yeah. Well, it's oxygen and nitrogen. Doesn't that have something to do with it? I saw it was just oxygen emitting the green. But I mean, yes, nitrogen produces some of the other colors. Gotcha.

Yeah. So if you're watching these, if you're one of the people, they vary in brightness, you know, they can right now, and actually for a while now, we've been in a pretty low, what's it called? The solar cycle. Yeah. We've been in a kind of a bummer of a solar cycle for a while now. And these auroras haven't been nearly spectacular as they have been in years past because of that. Yeah. I think they peaked in 2012, but even that, that was a solar maximum that when it peaked

and it started to decline. So solar cycle happens every 11 years, and we're starting up our 23rd one now. But this past one, the 22nd one, was like the lowest in a century. It was the weakest one in a century. Yeah. The weakest maximum even. But even still, weren't there, couldn't you see northern lights once in a while? Like fairly far south, a few years back. I don't remember.

I feel like- It says in here that you could see it, or at times you can see them in the southern United States, but I don't remember seeing them ever. I don't either. And supposedly there was a date in either 1987 or 1989 where they were visible from Cuba. Oh, wow. They were that far south. That might be as far south as this has ever been recorded, actually.

But normally you can see them the closer to the poles you are. So specifically in the north pole or south pole, the Arctic or Antarctica, you can see them basically every night. There are specific conditions to where they're more brilliant than others, right? So if you're looking for- What did you say if people watch them, they'd put them in categories one through four? Yeah, I didn't say that yet. But yeah, zero up through four from barely can see it to holy cow, that's amazing.

So if you're looking for the holy cow, that's amazing. Four, you would go looking on a moonless night where there's no clouds, where it's super, super cold. And maybe October or February or March. Yeah, I saw it also winter is the best time to see them. Winter in the north and winter in the south. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

All right, I'll buy that. Yeah, I thought that was weird that there's any confusion on that. Because there's like whole tourist industries that have grown up around this. Oh, maybe that's how they're trying to get you. You're like, ah, it's December, but you should still come. It's great. All right, you just come back in December too. So Northern Norway, Alaska, obviously you're going to get some pretty good stuff.

Southern Alaska, like you said, as things as you go south, it's going to diminish a little bit. But I would imagine Southern Alaska, you're still getting a pretty good show. Right. Don't you think? Yep. Sometimes you could see them. And I think this would probably be on par with Southern Alaska. I just got the worst feeling I'm going to get a bunch of emails.

Geography. But you can sometimes see them in Scotland even. I believe that maybe the Northern UK, you could conceivably see them once in a while. But I got the impression that Scotland is more regular than say over here in the Northern United States. Yeah, I think it says here Scotland in the UK, maybe one to 10 times a month. And then the US and Canada near the border, maybe just a couple to three or four times a year. Right.

Okay. I've never seen them, have you? No. And it says once or twice a century, you might see them in the Southern United States. So if it happened in the late 80s, we missed our shot, my friend. Which is weird because I would have been in Toledo. Maybe I was sleeping. It just seems like something that my mom would have woken me up for.

Yeah, I mean, I don't, it doesn't stand out to me as, like science teachers would have probably said something, but I don't remember that. Remember Haley's comment when that came through? It was huge. Yeah. Everybody was talking about, yeah. I guess maybe it could have caught everybody by surprise. I don't know about that.

I think this is pretty predictable, right? I don't know that that's true. What, that it's predictable? Yeah. Well, I think the conditions, they know the conditions where they will be the best, but maybe like the weather, you can't predict those conditions. Right. Suppose, yeah, I saw somewhere something like they can predict them within a few hours.

Oh, well, yeah. That's not enough time to get to Norway. No, it's not. From Georgia. So, so the scale is zero to four, like we were saying, and the people that enthusiasts that watch these, they actually can help contribute to science because, you know, there's not always someone, like you said, if it's just a few hours notice, there's not always a scientist there when you need them.

So, these enthusiasts, they record things. They record data to turn in, like the time, the date, the colors, the latitude, and some might even make a little sketch of what they're seeing. And that really goes a long way to helping the scientists out and helping them understand what our magnetic field is doing right now. Right. Right. And the scientists are like, we didn't ask for a sketch. We really appreciate the extra touch, you know?

Yeah, watercolors nice. Maybe put like a mint in the envelope too when you mail it off. That'd be nice. Why not? Scientists love mints. The apparently also Chuck, something that was in this article is that you can, there are aurorae on other, I'm just going to say auroras. There are auroras on other planets too.

Yeah, you know, I kind of wondered about that before I started researching, because like, you know, solar flares and winds don't just go toward Earth, and other planets have magnetic fields. So, surely this happens elsewhere. And it does. They've seen it on Jupiter, Saturn, yeah, Jupiter and Saturn. All right. But surely, I mean, like if it's, the point is if you have a magnetic field around a planet,

and an atmosphere around a planet that has ionic gases, and any time there's a solar flare, they can reach it and create an electrical current in that magnetosphere, then you have all the conditions right for an aurora. I guess the colors would be different though on Jupiter and Saturn, right? Because of different gases. That'd be awesome to see. Hydrogen and helium in their case, so I'm not sure what colors that would be. That's a chartreuse and brown.

A brown aurora. Maybe not the best. So, you want to take another break and then finish up? Yes, I have to wet down again. Okay. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boybander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

So Chuck, we didn't say a lot of the auroras that you see, um, they have, they form basically different shapes, like it can come in different, well, different shapes. Around the poles, you've got the ovals, the rings. But there's other shapes they can take too, and some of the more famous ones look like ribbons or curtains that kind of go basically from one horizon all the way to the other overhead. And they go in kind of this wavy river pattern,

but then the light stands upward into the atmosphere. But that's gotta be something to see, you know? Yeah, I mean, after researching this, I really, like, have a hankering to go see this in person one day. So I did too, and I still do, but I came across an article in The Independent, and it was written by one of the independence travel writers, and they said that going to see the Northern Lights was the most disappointing travel experience they have ever had in their entire life.

And she said that part of it is what had to do with the tour they went on. She said it sucked. It was a terrible tour. Ronnie, worst tour guide ever in the Yelp review. Well, supposedly it was, so this, it was a, they called them a Northern Lights chase, but the chase consisted of sitting in their host's living room, and then every once in a while, someone would go to the window

to see if the Northern Lights were out or not, and then they'd sit back down. That's the chase. She said that there are- Well, that's a dumb thing to call it. Right. It's not like you can, it's not like, it's just over there, we just need to get a fast enough truck.

And apparently there are those, like, those kind of operations, and that's what she thought she was getting. So she was had on the one hand. But she said the actual Northern Lights that she saw were kind of grayish and looked a lot like a chem, or a contrail. Right. And, or maybe even cigarette smoke in the sky, kind of fog at night. And then she realized Ronnie was just smoking.

And it wasn't, it wasn't until she saw the picture that the host took of them, which requires like a long exposure, like 10 to 14 seconds. That's when the colors and all the amazingness comes out. So everything you've seen in the pictures is from the long exposure, and apparently in person, it's very rare that you see something that looks like the pictures. It looks very much different in real life, apparently.

Oh, wow. Yeah, and that disappointing. That's a huge bummer, but you just saved me like 10 grand. Right. Oh, so that, that is really disappointing. That's a long exposure effect. Yes. As far as the independent writer says that,

she said once she saw the picture, she was like, oh, that's, yeah, it's a, it's a photo that we're seeing. She said in real life, they don't look like that. So the article, you can read it yourself. Why seeing the Northern Lights was the most disappointing travel experience of my life. It was in the independent. Well, I'm going to change my wish then.

I don't want to pay to go on some dumb chase. I just want to happen upon them on a regular trip somewhere. There you go. That I'm already happy with. Yeah, like Icelanders. Actually, she, she makes the same exact point. She said the rest of the trip was awesome. She said the, the, the, I think she was in Norway.

And she said that the, the, just everything else about it was one of the best trips she's ever been on. It was the Northern Lights themselves that specifically stunk. And if you make that, you know, part of your tour, but not the whole reason you're going, you probably wouldn't be disappointed to visit the far north of Norway. Well, because I'm sure that's great on its own, you know, that's what she was saying. Yeah. I mean, gosh, I'm scrolling through the pictures now.

It's amazing. That's a, I thought that's what it looked like. Right. That's what everybody thinks apparently, but and sometimes I guess it does, but you are extraordinarily lucky if you're seeing the Northern Lights. And it looks like that in person from, from what this lady's saying. Well, plus if you go on one of those, there's nothing worse than feeling duped into an, uh, duped into spending a lot of money on a tour. Yeah. It's some dude's house.

Yeah. I'd like to see video. That would be more telling. Yeah. She can't, can't just expose it like that with video. Can you not? Well, I mean, you can open up the exposure to get a, to get the video to look right, but it won't be just like a, you know, it's not like opening the exposure on, uh, moving traffic at night with a photograph. And you'll see like the dragging of the taillights and stuff like that.

Right. Like it won't create some weird effect. I wonder if you use like a high speed filter, it would do it. Or do you want low speed? A high speed filter? You know, obviously I'm a, I'm a professional photographer. Should we talk a little bit about the sound? Yeah, definitely.

It makes a farting noise, which is really interesting. Yeah. And it kind of smells too. That would make it all more fun at least. No, but there have long been people that swore that it makes a sound. And not everyone, because apparently, and you know, someone actually found this out. It's a sound that only some people can hear sometimes. Yeah. And the kitchens have to be super ripe for it.

And there's very specific ones. And there's this one poor guy. His name was UNTOKE LANE. He's a Finnish, I believe. He's an acoust, acoustician. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah.

Good job. From Finland, who was on a camping trip in I think 2000. And the Northern Lights were just going off and going crazy. He said he could hear like popping and crackling sounds. And everyone said, well, that's because you were drunk. And he's like, no, I know for a fact I heard this. So he spent like the next 15 years, basically, trying to capture the sounds of the Aurora Borealis.

And he finally was successful, apparently, in 2011. Yeah. And his whole deal was, well, when he was with his friends, first of all, he said they had to be completely still. It's not such a noise that they're having a conversation. And they were like, oh, what's that? Like they had to be dead silent. They had to not move in order to hear it.

And then even within his group, some people couldn't hear it at all because it was just very low intensity. Right. But he's, like you said, been chasing that buzz ever since. And finally, as he figured out, I think he figured out the conditions first, right? Or did he do that? Did he back it in afterward?

He put two and two together. So we went out and he captured it one night, right? The sounds. And then he went and looked up the, like I guess the Weather Service's report for that local area. And he figured out that what he had been sitting under is called a thermal inversion layer, where kind of warm, at least compared to the air beneath it on the ground, warm air is kind of trapping the cold air below it.

And as long as the conditions are super still and it's very cold, they're going to stay separate, right? Yeah, it's got to be clear, calm and cold. Right. So it can't just be just an irregular aurora, like you have to have a sub set of conditions to get this crackle noise. Exactly, right? So in the warm air, the warm air layer,

a lot of electrons become charged. And the cold air below it, an opposite charge builds, right? So you have this electrical charge just waiting to go off and turn into a current. And apparently it's the aurora above it that causes the charge to actually turn into a current. Yeah, he was pretty surprised at first because he didn't just point a microphone, he had this array

so he could triangulate exactly where the sound was coming from. And it was just 230 feet above him was the sound. Right. And he was, I don't know what the finish expression for holy crap is. It's a oi vei. I don't think so. But that's what he said. And he was like, you know, this is weird, this is so low.

And that's when he came up with this theory. And does it check out fully or? Everybody said, you know, that's probably right. Yeah, the very least came up with definitive proof that this was the sound coming from it. But yeah, the fact that it was just overhead in the thermal inversion layer explained how you could conceivably hear the northern lights. Amazing.

Yeah, pretty amazing. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I'm just disappointed now. Yeah, for real. I'm disappointed in the northern lights and our episode on the northern lights. No.

If you, yeah, man, the sun, any time the sun comes into play, it's a curse, a pox on us. If you want to know more about the northern lights, go see them yourself. And if you have seen them in person and know us to be incorrect, let us know because we would like our dreams back. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast or Josh Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook at Stuff You Should Know or Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, I started this one early, which goes to show, again, worst episode ever.

It's time for Listener Mail. That's right. I'm going to call this, well, it's just a nice email. Hey, guys, I've been a fan since 2010 when I was a freshman in college. I don't think I've ever written in, though. This entire time I've been an evangelist, but to no avail. That all changed a few months ago. I convinced the love of my life, Meredith, to give you guys a shot.

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You were the first podcast. I ever listened to and still my favorite sleep well tonight, knowing that you are fostering love and real human connections out here in podcast land. That is a great email. That was nice. That is from Sam Martin in Omaha. He's a medical student and a bar trivia master. Thanks to us, he said.

Nice. Well, thanks a lot, Sam. Yeah, Sam and Meredith. Thanks a lot, Meredith, for giving us a shot. We're glad it paid off. It reminds me of me and Yumi doing long distance for a while. It can really, really suck. I remember that.

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