awn and Boreas the Greek god of the northern wind. Galileo reportedly first used the term aurora borealis to refer to the Northern Lights, due to their resembling an early dawn and by the 17th century the phrase aurora borealis was in common usage (Davis, 1978).
             Galileo hypothesized that the aurora borealis was caused by "sunlight reflecting from the high atmosphere," (Davis, 1978). Although wrong, Galileo did come close to the truth. The aurora borealis is caused by an interaction between the sun and the earth but just no in the way Galileo imagined. The sun's thermonuclear reactions cause an emission of a constant stream of ions commonly referred to as solar wind. Technically, solar wind is a plasma field and not an actual breeze. In any case, when the solar wind eventually reaches the vicinity of earth it collides with particles suspended in the Earth's atmosphere, between 60 to 600 kilometers above the surface of the planet (Brady). Traveling at 300 to 1,000 kilometers per second, around one million miles per hour, solar wind takes an estimated 2-5 days to reach the earth (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration; Pettersen, 1994).
             The solar wind plasma is mainly formed of electrons. Those electrons collide mainly with gaseous oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the upper atmospheric regions. The collision energizes the atmospheric particles, creating a visible emission of colored light: the aurora borealis. Moreover, the Earth's magnetic field actually "guides" the solar wind into the atmosphere and toward the poles (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, 2002). Magnetism also stretches the plasma in a squid-like formation. The tail of the squid points away from the sun, on the side of the earth opposite the solar body because the magnetosphere of the earth bends and reshapes the solar plasma.
             The tail of the formation is cylindrical, with a diameter equivalent to 30-60 times the ...