The sun’s furnace-like centre spews forth, through massive eruptions, huge amounts of charged particles. Known as solar wind or plasma, these particles race through space at fantastic speeds of up to five million miles per hour and reach Earth, 93 million miles away, around 18 hours later.

The particles next penetrate the Earth’s magnetic field and flow down into the ionosphere along the lines of the magnetic field around the poles. At an altitude of between 60 and 400 miles, the particles strike the gases in the ionosphere, causing them to glow and thus form what we know as the Aurora Borealis.

The phenomenon is mostly limited to the polar regions, occurring in a 2500 km radius centered on the geomagnetic pole. This so-called “auroral zone” extends over northern Scandinavia, Iceland, the southern tip of Greenland and continues over northern Canada, Alaska and along the northern coast of Siberia.

In classic mythology, Aurora was the Roman goddess of the dawn; while “boreal” is a Latin word, meaning "north." The Southern Hemisphere has its equivalent of the Northern Lights, the Aurora Australis; the name being given to the phenomenon by Captain Cook in 1773 when he first saw the lights on his initial voyage south of the Antarctic Circle.

Through the centuries there have been numerous theories and hypotheses put forward as to what causes the aurora, however it would not be until the mid-twentieth century that this wonderful conundrum of nature would once and for all be correctly  explained by scientists.