Joan Feynman
Videos
Joan Feynman was an American astrophysicist and space physicist. She made contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations, and magnetospheric physics. She was known
January 2015
An aurora display over Calgary
Joan Feynman
Aurora
Videos
An aurora is a natural light display in Earth's upper atmosphere caused by charged particles from the Sun colliding with atoms in the atmosphere. These collisions excite oxygen and nitrogen, which the
Joan Feynman
…a spacecraft over its lifetime, and for uncovering a method for predicting sunspot cycles. She was particularly known for illuminating the origin of auroras. Feynman was raised in the Far Rockaway section of Queens, New York City, along with her elder brother, Richard Feynman (who became a Nobel Prize-winning…
Earth's night-side upper atmosphere appears from the bottom as bands of afterglow illuminating the troposphere in orange with silhouettes of clouds at the top, and the stratosphere in white and blue at the top of the middle. Next, the mesosphere (pink area) extends to the orange and faintly green line of the lowest airglow, at about one hundred kilometres at the edge of space and the lower edge of the thermosphere (invisible). Continuing with green and red bands of auroras stretching over several hundred kilometres.
Different forms
Divergence point of a coronal aurora
2024 appearance seen in England radiating blue through red aurora