00:00The main effect we get most of the time from the standard, sort of modest-sized solar flares
00:06is the northern lights, the aurora borealis, and the southern lights, the aurora australis,
00:11which are the colorful dancing lights you see if you're in far northern Alaska or Canada.
00:16Solar maximum means the Sun.
00:18It's most active, it's generating the most magnetic storms on its surface
00:22and the most ejections of high-energy particles towards the Earth.
00:26That follows an 11-year cycle.
00:28Well, we don't know why it's 11 years, so the Sun is, in other words, brightening
00:31in the sense that its total energy output, not the part we can see,
00:35but the total energy output is slightly higher by close to a tenth of a percent
00:40than it was five years ago.
00:42The result of this is that the Sun is rotating.
00:45The Sun rotates once around on its axis in 26 days,
00:48and beneath the surface it's rotating even faster.
00:51And the Sun, of course, is very hot, so all the particles are charged,
00:55and charged rotating particles generate magnetic fields.
00:58So these magnetic fields are generated below the surface of the Sun.
01:02They also drive a solar wind, which is a wind of particles,
01:07like the wind outside, that spreads out throughout the solar system.
01:11And they are, among other things, responsible for the northern lights,
01:14the aurora borealis, because when those charged particles hit the Earth's magnetic field,
01:18they spiral around the field and crash into the North Magnetic Pole,
01:22and that excites the air molecules to glow red and green and other colors.
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