2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 6 6 6 6 6 lol. Lol. Moving. Forward. 2 Just. The way. Well I went. 2. Don't like being locked up this guy. Commission from the B.B.C. And that all legal pool full of all that work. Well in 20 minutes time. To return to the stage with another soprano. To perform 4 songs by Richard Strauss inspired by his soprano wife before the fill itself takes center stage for an orchestral showpiece that so much more than just that real journey from darkness to light. District. We find out more about the. Latest scientific research into the phenomenon musical and you just heard him in. A promise plus recorded a couple of hours ago at the Imperial College of the present. Hello Today we're turning our gaze northwards travelling beyond the confines of the Imperial College Union beyond the M $25.00 beyond the what for Gap and on towards the dark winter skies of the far north the object of our quest the. Northern Lights nature's most spectacular light show I'm Eleanor Roseman back home and as a historian my research into all things Viking and Arctic often takes me to the chilly northern latitudes where this display can be enjoyed but if you've never been lucky enough to witness it for yourselves let me conjure it up for you by channeling that most remarkable of Arctic explorer is Norwegian bad ass for Nansen so during his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1903 he saw more than his fair share of the Northern Lights that he with never failed to be blown away by them and he wrote nothing more wonderfully beautiful can exist in the Arctic night it is dreamland painted in the imaginations most delicate tense it is color a theory allies. One shade melts into the other so that you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins and yet they are all there no forms it is all faint dreamy color music a far away long drawn out melody on muted string Presently the of or a bari Arliss shakes over the vault of heaven its veil of glittering silver changing now to yellow now to green now to red and all the time this utter stillness impressive as the symphony of infinity so with the notes of faith this symphony and in bells a rural premier ringing in our ears it's high time to set out in nonsense footsteps and discover the northern lights for ourselves joining me Nathan case senior research associate at Lancaster University and Melanie wind Ridge author of who are in search of the Northern Lights So 1st of all I'd like to know when and where you 1st saw the Northern Lights for me I think it was a few years ago in terms of that I've never had a huge amount of luck I managed to miss them in Iceland in Greenland even in small bugs so Nathan how about you my 1st glimpse of the war was actually from the U.K. And I know that was surprising people perhaps might not think that actually is visible here but it is the most majestic show that I've seen the one that really sticks in my mind was actually from last year I went to Iceland I went to Reykjavik and that was where we had the overhead display that beautiful Corona that exploded over our heads many have. The 1st time I saw the Northern Lights was in 2013 in Sweden and I went there because I've been wanting to see it for a while I did a Ph D. In plasma physics and the aurora is a plasma phenomenon and I thought I'm a plasma physicist I should see this most spectacular natural plasma phenomenon and so I went on an Arctic science course for a week up to Sweden and every evening we'd go out to look for the Northern Lights and that was where I 1st saw it and it wasn't the most spectacular display but it just made me want to go back because to see the aurora in the Arctic environment gives a wholly different appreciation to seeing it in pictures and in videos and I just wanted more of it I wanted to go to the Arctic again and you went to Scotland Scandinavia Svalbard did you have to get the sense that locals were a little less excited so the every day than for you yes of course it is but it depends on which locals you're talking to but I remember a reindeer herd of selling me once that for them it was just like the weather it was just this normal thing so anything can you relate the description Munson's description of the Northern Lights is do you have to lose that sense of wonder well I haven't. Yes I can relate so I think a lot of people might think that war is going to be very visible by eye color actually quite often what you might see is that it might look like a silvery cloud to start with I think that's what was mentioned and then as the storm grows and it's particularly strong you might start picking up the color by I particularly the Greens and the yellows as we mentioned and really expect is the camera that can bring out this wonderful mesmerizing display of color and it will so let's get to the nitty gritty before we get too caught up in the wonder and mystery so I want to start Melanie with something fairly specific So what are the new than lights which. Solid liquid gas what are they talking plasma the 4th state of matter I mentioned before that it's the most spectacular natural plasma phenomenon and I'm a plasma physicist but many people don't actually know what a plasma is well it's just an electrically charged gas it's the most extreme state of matter in the universe exists when there's enough energy to strip atoms apart so electrons can come away from the the central nucleus of the atom and that means that you have 2 charges you have the negatively charged electrons moving around separately to positively charge nuclei and that means that you have an electrically charged gas and this is a plasma and it's dynamics is more complicated than a gas because as well as being a fluid you've also got these charges and the movement feedback on each other so plasma is usually quite dynamic and chaotic but they're also very beautiful because they often emit light so you're actually quite familiar with plasmas because the sun is a plasma or lightning is a plasma flames neon lights all of these things a plasma is that we're probably quite familiar with so Nathan take us through the chain of events how does this solar matter get from out there to somewhere that we can see in the sky what's going on it always makes sense to start the sun really and as Melanie mentioned the sun is a massive ball of plasma and the plasma is inside the sun it's so hot and it's so energetic that it's able to escape the sun's gravity so the solar matter which is these charged particles of plasma scapes in the Suns are trapped with spin and the corona flies through space comes hurtling past us maybe 40500 kilometers per 2nd and it collides with the Earth's magnetic field I want to interact with our magnetic field. Didn't channel down into our atmosphere. And they're applied to the atmospheric particles and once it quite a them it gives a bit of energy to them up an energy state we call it and when the particles become energized they want to get rid of actual energy that are like being in a high energy state and they do that by giving off light and it's that light which we see is the war so why is it that sometimes we see it sometimes we don't and in some periods of history it may not have paid for for decades is that to do with where it comes from in the 1st place or through the Sun Yes Sure so the sun is producing the solar wind constantly and you can think of that it's like a summer breeze it's always there it's just blowing in the background but particular times you get a really strong gust of wind to come and blow at you and that's just like the solar wind so at times and vents on the solar surface called coronal mass ejections or streamers and related to Corona holes and these produce really fast gusts of solar wind and if those gusts and those explosions are plasma they can generate really strong displays but this is all fairly recent knowledge isn't it Melanie tell us how scientists came to understand what the Northern Lights are when it's all happened over over hundreds of years because I think it kind of goes in step with our technologies if you like because that enables us to see further or see in more detail and so if you go back to let's say the middle of the 17th hundreds around then that was when they 1st discovered electricity and they discovered the connection between electricity and magnetism as well and people started thinking that maybe the Aurora had something to do with electricity and magnetism they had noticed already that compass needles would be deflected when there was in a rural storm so they thought there was a magnetic link and there was a scientist at the end of the $800.00 called Christian butler and he was the Norwegian He was working in Oslo and he believes that the Aurora was something to do with the magnetic. Field of the earth and also maybe to do with the charged particles the electron it just been discovered as well and he actually went up and did expeditions to northern Norway to a place called Delta and he would spend the winter out there once in about 181-0098 was he and 3 others spent the winter on a mountain called Helder in northern Norway it must have been brutal it was 24 hour darkness it was freezing cold probably down to like minus 30 minus 40 and they were watching the Aurora Apparently they had a big barrel outside that they would sit in because the barrel would protect them from the wind and they could look up and see the aurora and they were taking magnetic measurements as well and Berkland used this data when he was back in Oslo to put together his theories of what caused the Aurora Buckland's efforts were very much rewarded in culture I mean he's now his pictures and what the 200 was on the 200 Krone know until last year which was the 100th anniversary of his death and then they changed it to hold a card. Which I thought was a little less inspiring than question but I couldn't agree more so he's a motorized in space physics Those are we we call these current system the Brooklyn currents and so he does have a he has a current system named after him if not currency. So they can tell us a bit more about you what you think you are going to end up on the Gnutella Bank I think that's probably doubtful. We now since the advent of the space age we can actually put satellites into orbit and we can measure current systems flowing electrons in situ and we can measure magnetic fields and and that's my research so I use satellite data to look at the Earth's magnetic field and how that responds to the solar wind particularly changes in the solar wind in this is these gusts come off the Sun How does that affect our space environment but it's not just highly trained professionals. Yourself he's contributing to our knowledge in the field but you're very involved in citizen science Yeah that's right so the traditional side of science is to use instruments and it's professional scientists looking at that but their war is a phenomenon that engages everybody and so people are outside looking at this beautiful majestic display and their observations are just as useful as a scientist observations they've got digital cameras D.S.L. Are taking high resolution pictures and movies of their war and so citizen scientists that's the every day layman basically is out taking observations and we can use those to learn more about the war when you run something cool a room or watch you K. What was that about so at Lancaster we run this service go to what U.K. And we have some instruments were called magnetometers and they measure the Earth's magnetic field in particular the changes in the magnetic field caused by the Aurora and so when we detect changes in the magnetic field we can say well how big are these changes how strong is they were likely to be and where can it be seen from and so actually issues alerts to people in the U.K. Of when and where you might see the OR Well let's go a little further afield because I have a friend from Arctic Norway who is telling me only yesterday that she said as a child she and her friends used to wave at the moving lights with a white cloth but they do we stay very near the house so soon as the rural sort of flared up they could run inside the house and so it was always this fear as well is this and once she was up in Love foton that Melanie you've been up in that part of the world's yourself when you were off searching for the Northern Lights what sort of beliefs and folk tales did you discover that were connected to them. Well that one in Norway about you know they have a story about not teasing the northern lights because if you tease the northern lights then they can come down and get you and in fact I heard that from a reindeer heard of that I spoke to one day he said that when he was a child the Aurora were the natural babysitters Those are his words he said that parents are tell their children they mustn't be home late because otherwise the northern lights would get them and I think it is based on that story of not and not teasing the Northern Lights respecting the northern lights there are other there are other stories as well and sometimes sometimes they just the northern lights because they're normal as with this disgust they just come in like every day stories the northern lights just happen to be there but then there are other stories that are more Aurora specific and they maybe describe what the or is for example but a lot of communities or a lot of indigenous people around the Arctic would say that the Aurora was the spirits sometimes it was of the animals that they hunted sometimes it was of their dead relatives or their enemies or their unborn children even and often these spirits were doing strange things like maybe they were stirring large cooking pots or there was one story where the spirits were playing football with a wall or a skull but I think the stories give the sense of movement and the system of the Aurora and they've been woven into history for a really long time so I believe my mind saying that we've actually seen cave drawings petroglyphs of war and these agents of lies ations documenting the war in their paintings and certainly sticking with that historical theme I mean there's an amazing 10th century Baghdadi diplomat even Fadlallah and he travels from Baghdad up into Russia he leaves a travel account and there he talks about the Northern Lights and he thinks that it's an army fighting in the sky it's diabolical gens locked in a time. Bottle there seems to be something quite terrifying sometimes about these stories and they're not the only historical accounts that were to where the Northern Lights inspire terror as well as wonder the many know in fact they tend to be the stories tended to be separated depending on where you were in the world if you like or actually your latitude so. As Nathan said earlier sometimes you can see the aurora from the U.K. For example and even further south so usually it happens around the poles we see them in this this ring around the poles but if there's greater solar activity then that ring can widen and the aurora can come further south and generally when they were comes further south it also can become more red in color and it's probably more active because it's a bigger display and so. You get these different stories so if they were seen in more like mid-latitude locations then it was usually read in color so there was a real sense of foreboding all that it was a bad omen and because they looked like fires in the sky or blood in the sky or that hill as well could be Saud's And so there are there are stories for example I think that the war was said to have foretold the death of Julius Caesar and pre-sales the American Civil War and now these events are about 2000 years apart so you can see that for a long time there was a lot of superstition associated with the Northern Lights and Nathan the idea of the Northern Lights is an omen of disaster may seem fanciful but the plasma that gives rise to them can actually cause problems can't. Space Weather forecasting help and what sort of problems does it cause for a particularly strong solar events really big gusts of solar wind or Sun contained within is this charge plasma that's coming off and the magnetic fields that come from the sun's surface and they can really come slamming into the US market shield of America need. And when it does that it actually introduces a lot of energy and a lot of charged particles into our near Earth space environment and that's quite dangerous to satellites so modern society relies an awful lot on satellites whether it's for things like G.P.S. Or satellite communications satellite T.V. And if those satellites are damaged it cannot go a spacecraft offline or it can cause glitches in errors in this spacecraft but also it can affect on the ground too so. These electrical electric charged particles produce electrical currents particularly on things like power grids and all pipelines and what the electrical companies really don't want is extra current being applied to their grid because it can blow out things like Transformers so can you do anything to actually protect against that. The thing down the hatch it's a bit of both so if we get a good enough forecast then you can turn satellites off or you can try and turn them around and that helps to reduce any damage to the actual electrical systems and power companies can plan for mitigation methods so they can maybe open up different supply lines or they can they can try and reduce the effects on the grids so Melanie let's look to the future from your point of view and I'll ask him as well but what's the next big unknown if we can understand the sun more and if we can make better predictions of what's happening on the sun particularly when these coronal mass ejections might be released then that will make it easier for the national grid for example to protect themselves in the satellites but also make it easier for a rural hunters to get out there and actually see the Northern Lights and that will be a lovely thing to say Nathan what next to be then I think one of the big questions that will hopefully be answered soon with the park a solar probe that we may have heard of was recently launched by NASA and what is that going to that's going to. Going to the sun that's heading straight towards the sun and one of the key questions that is aiming to unlock is how this solar wind is produced and how it's really accelerated to supersonic speeds at the outer edges of the sun's atmosphere and this probe is there close is that we've ever been to the sun. It's going to be about 4000000 kilometers from the sun surface but that sounds like quite a lot but actually that's 7 times closer than we've ever been before and that's just due to the incredible temperatures that it's going to experience and this is a really really important step in understanding how the solar wind is formed Thank you I think the time has come for us to shake the ice from our hair and beards turn our gaze from the heavens head for home and return to the Royal Albert Hall for the 2nd half of the program my thanks to Melanie wind Ridge Nathan case and everyone here at the Imperial College Union goodbye. Thank you I've shaken the ice that was Eleanor Roosevelt Barack laughed I don't forget there are a promise possible answer to Imperial College every day of the season so still another 10 days to go they're all free they finish in very good time to get back to the hole for the concert so do have a look on the B.B.C. Proms website for more details of what's happening if you're coming to prom it's always good to see you out improve. Welcome back to the Royal Albert Hall for me Martin Hadley We're live as always during this 2018 B.B.C. Proms season here on Radio 3 the home of the problems and tonight on stage it's the Royal Liverpool for the morning joined by chief conductor Patrick. They end with the orchestral fa