The Northern Lights

One of the world’s most fascinating and natural wonders are the Northern Lights. These magical lights come in a variety of dancing colors. This seemingly random light show occurs as a result of interactions of Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere with solar winds. Solar winds released by the Sun’s sunspot regions travel through space until they meet with Earth’s magnetosphere. Usually, the magnetic field is strong enough to block these winds, but near the poles, it is weak enough to be penetrated by the solar winds. The solar winds collide with Earth’s atmosphere and create the beautiful lights that we’ve come to admire.

How Hard is Interstellar Travel?

Traveling to other solar systems seem pretty easy in the movies, but in real life, it could get quite complicated. First of all, the closest star system to us is Alpha Centauri, which is 4.37 light-years away, which is very far from us even if we can travel at the speed of light. But even traveling close to that speed is a problem. The fastest manmade object in history was the Parker Solar Probe that reached speeds of 430,000 miles per hour using the gravity of the sun to accelerate it. That speed is only 0.064% of the speed of light! So maybe we could just use normal rockets to get there? Well, accelerating a spaceship to a tenth of the speed of light would take 4.50×10¹⁷ joules, which is about twice the yield of a hydrogen bomb. So reaching a fraction of the speed of light requires a dangerous amount of energy, so it seems like visiting the closest star system is impossible at the moment, let alone other galaxies.

Nuclear Fusion in the Sun

Nuclear fusion is the process in which the Sun and all other stars generate energy through the combination of light atoms into heavier ones. The nuclear fusion in most stars is carried out in proton-proton fusion. In the first step, two protons fused together to create a proton-neutron core and emitting a neutrino and positron. Then, the core is fused with another proton to form helium-3. Finally, two helium-3 atoms are combined together to create helium-4 with two additional protons. Since the mass of the final product in this process is lower than the mass of its original components, the “missing” mass was converted into energy. The quantity of this energy can be calculated by Einstein’s famous formula: e = mc^2. Because the speed of light is such a massive quantity, even the most tiny of masses converted into energy will yield very large outputs.