Chase the "light" during the New Year! 2025 may continue to explode, the hardcore truth is...

During this Spring Festival holiday, many young people flew to Sweden, Norway and other places to start the new year with a dreamy aurora trip. Chasing the "light" during the New Year's Eve is quietly becoming popular among young people. Experts have confirmed that the year 2024, which just passed, was the year with the strongest aurora outbreak in the past 20 years.

On May 11, 2024, the aurora over Beijing was gorgeous, with large swathes of colorful light swinging across the sky, which was very shocking. In the early morning of October 11, affected by the geomagnetic storm, auroras were seen again in many places in Beijing. At the beginning of the new year, auroras appeared again in many parts of my country.

Some people say that the Aurora is a torch that leads the soul to the sky, a beautiful fox fire, and an elf in the night sky. For thousands of years, humans have used all beautiful words to describe it and all romantic imaginations to guess it, but they can't express even one ten-thousandth of the beauty of the Aurora.

However, behind this beautiful aurora feast, there are many mysteries of the sun.

How are the auroras formed?

Since the beginning of 2024, solar activity has frequently erupted, and flares and geomagnetic storms have frequently occurred, which also means that the sun's activity has reached a peak.

The sun is a huge fusion reactor. When the reaction is intense, it will eject coronal material. These materials carry a large amount of plasma. They move in the universe. Some of them reach the earth, enter the earth's poles along the magnetic lines of force, and collide with carbon and nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere, forming beautiful auroras.

Usually the aurora appears in high-latitude areas, but because the solar activity this year is very intense, the range of the aurora is gradually expanding to low-latitude areas, so the aurora rarely appeared in the sky above Beijing in the mid-latitudes.

Behind the Aurora——"Kuafu-1" However, all of this was seen by "Kuafu-1", which was expected long ago. On October 9, 2022, my country's first comprehensive solar survey satellite "Kuafu-1" was successfully launched at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, taking the peak of the 25th solar activity cycle as an opportunity to achieve a breakthrough in my country's comprehensive solar survey satellite.

Schematic diagram of the "Kuafu-1" satellite. Photo courtesy of the Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences

What does the sun look like? In fact, the sun's appearance is much richer than we imagine. This is because the sun can release light of all wavelengths. In addition to the visible light we can see, there are also gamma rays with shorter wavelengths or infrared rays with longer wavelengths, which is why the aurora is so gorgeous.

Colorful sunlight source colorful spiritual light

Although the sun is a big round fireball in our impression, our "Kuafu-1" is a versatile solar observer and can easily grasp the true face of the sun.

"Kuafu-1" carries three very powerful weapons, namely the Hard X-ray Imager (HXI), the Full Disk Vector Magnetometer (FMG) and the Lyman-Alpha Solar Telescope (LST). By combining the three, we can observe the imaging of the sun in different bands.

The three major payloads of Kuafu-1. Image source: Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences

What is more worth mentioning is that the scientific goal of Kuafu-1 is called "one magnetic field and two storms". From the picture below, we can see that this is the image of solar activity captured by our Kuafu-1 from space.

The LST payload on the Kuafu-1 satellite observed a series of solar activity phenomena

It is precisely because "Kuafu-1" is constantly monitoring the sun's every move that we can see the magnificent mystery behind the aurora, and even more so the bright future of China's solar exploration.

Kuafu was born with great ambition, and he raced with the sun. Standing at a new historical starting point, we see the myth of "Kuafu chasing the sun" gradually becoming a reality.

(Author: Dong Weiyi, Zhejiang Science and Technology Museum)

This article is compiled based on the winning works of the first "Shen Kuo Cup" Popular Science Short Video Creation Competition