♪♪
The aurora borealis,
better known as the northern lights,
have mystified scientists for centuries.
The aurora is just magical.
I can't actually explain it,
but you just can't stop watching it.
What we really don't understand is the really big picture.
We have an enormous amount still to learn.
Now an international team
of aurora-hunting scientists is undertaking
a series of pioneering experiments to reveal
what really causes the northern lights'
mysterious colors, patterns, and shapes.
I've never seen this as a scientist before.
It's something fundamentally and profoundly new.
The hunt for aurora could even answer
one of humanity's greatest questions.
Can we detect aurora on planets outside our solar system,
and that might tell us there's life on those planets.
Unlocking the secrets of the aurora
is transforming our understanding of our planet
and our place in the universe.
Captions by vitac... www.vitac.com
captions paid for by discovery communications
♪♪
The aurora borealis is a magical spectacle of the frozen north...
♪♪
But despite hundreds of years of investigation,
scientists are still trying to unlock its deepest secrets.
What causes these celestial fireworks?
What can their color tell us about our atmosphere?
And why can they suddenly appear
over unexpected parts of our planet?
The northwest territories in Canada
are the best place on earth to hunt down answers.
♪♪
For 240 nights a year, when the sun sets,
the northern lights light up this frozen landscape.
♪♪
aurora hunter Emma spanswick braves the elements
to set up a pioneering piece of aurora-watching technology.
♪♪
Yellowknife has the best chance of aurora...
Basically, in Canada right now.
It's... It's in the perfect spot,
right in the heart of the auroral zone,
and that's why we came.
Emma has dedicated her career
to revealing the northern lights' deepest secrets.
She's installing a super-wide-angled color-camera.
Its images will help Emma understand
why the northern lights suddenly appear in the night sky.
This is our new color aurora-camera
that's going out for a test tonight.
It's got a 360-degree lens on it,
so we should see the entire lake here,
and, hopefully, some nice aurora.
Emma's camera will complement a network of cameras
that monitor the night sky across a continent
over 3,500 miles east to west.
♪♪
Minus-2 is pretty comfortable, the right temperature for this.
So, if you get multiples of these cameras
and you separate them by the appropriate distance,
you can stitch them together
and make a great view of the aurora across Canada,
and that's what we're going to do.
The camera needs big horizons
to capture as much of the sky as possible,
so Emma's frostbitten observatory
is in the center of a frozen lake
with no mountains, no trees,
and no buildings blocking the view.
Once the camera is installed,
all Emma can do is sit back
and wait for the aurora to appear.
♪♪
This is absolutely part of the life of an auroral chaser.
You need a lot of Patience in this line of work,
but it will come out.
It's minus-20 degrees celsius,
and it's going to be a long night.
That's because Emma doesn't know exactly
when the lights are going to appear.
♪♪
The northern lights are driven by our sun.
93-million miles away,
the surface of the sun throws out a constant stream
of charged particles called the solar wind.
Left unchecked, this wind could strip away earth's atmosphere
and extinguish all life on the planet,
but luckily, the earth has a magnetic field
that cocoons the whole globe.
The magnetic field funnels the solar wind's energy
towards the earth's poles
where it excites the gases in our atmosphere
and produces the spectacular lights we call the aurora.
♪♪
For four hours, waiting in the cold, nothing happens.
But at 10:45 P.M.,
Emma's camera captures the first glimmer
of what the lights have to offer.
This is exceptionally good news, very exciting.
♪♪
These time-lapse images reveal a sky alive with color,
dancing to the solar wind's beat,
and this video footage reveals sweeping bands of brilliant,
green light as it unfurls across the night sky.
It looks like it's going to brighten up,
running right across the sky, almost horizon to horizon.
Emma will be up all night taking photos of the aurora,
as she investigates what makes the lights appear
because every few hours somewhere on earth,
for reasons not yet fully understood,
the auroras suddenly burst into life.
And once a decade, the lights can become super-charged
into an even more spectacular show.
They appear suddenly in places completely unexpected,
even as far south as Cuba.
aurora hunters are trying to discover
what forces these arctic-light shows down to the tropics.
♪♪
The first time I saw the aurora was really in Alaska.
I just stood out for well over an hour in these freezing,
freezing conditions,
and just enjoyed this totally spectacular sight.
In Washington, D.C.,
aurora hunter Nicky fox is investigating
why, for their most spectacular displays,
the aurora appear where they're normally never seen.
If you want to see the aurora,
you will do have to travel north, somewhere cold,
but those are more the events that happen almost every day,
but from time to time, we have these huge solar events
that can drive the aurora down towards the south,
towards the equator.
Nicky's office is NASA's Goddard space center
in Maryland.
She's investigating one of the most extreme aurora on record.
Just before Halloween 2003,
a massive storm erupts from the surface of the sun.
Huge aurora follow just days later.
And what made it so spectacular was it was one very large event,
and then just after it came a second big solar event.
♪♪
These solar eruptions reveal billions of tons
of high-energy plasma heading straight for earth.
It's sending all this material streaming away from the sun
at millions of miles an hour, right towards the earth,
and we're ready to take the impact,
so we knew two to three days after these events
were first seen on the sun,
something big was going to happen at the earth.
When the solar storm hit,
aurora exploded where they're normally never seen.
It was, you know, at night.
It was 11:00 at night, so it was dark.
And I looked up and I thought, "why can I see a sunset?"
And I realized that what I was seeing
was the red glow in the sky to the north of me,
and there it was, a beautiful red aurora.
Nicky saw the 2000 Halloween aurora
in her backyard in Baltimore.
It gave a clue to why massive solar storms
pushed the aurora so far south.
When it actually comes to the earth,
it is carrying a magnetic field in it,
and the earth also has a magnetic field.
When they're in opposite directions,
they actually connect.
This sudden connection between the solar storm and earth
releases huge amounts of energy into earth's upper atmosphere...
♪♪
Unleashing the aurora across huge bands
of the northern hemisphere,
lighting up continents that normally remain shrouded
in darkness.
But these storms create more than beautiful light shows.
They can have dangerous consequences.
By the time we see aurora light up the night sky,
it may already be too late.
♪♪
It may already be too late.
♪♪
At holloman air force base in new Mexico,
the second weather squadron monitors the sun 24/7
and issues warnings
when a solar storm is on course to hit earth.
Solar storms are very dangerous.
They can knock out our satellite and GPS communications,
can even knock out the power grid.
It rests on the shoulders of staff sergeant David glowacki
to predict when the next solar super-storm will strike.
♪♪
World leaders should be worried about a solar event.
I don't even think you can put a monetary value on it.
His job is to alert the U.S. air force
each time a solar storm threatens earth,
and before the storm sets the earth's atmosphere alight
with dazzling displays of aurora.
We have a body in this chair from sunrise to sunset,
365 days a year, and if a flare did occur,
we have two minutes' response time
to get that notification out across our network.
Right now, a solar prominence... A huge loop of super-hot plasma,
extending up and out of the sun's surface...
Has caught glowacki's attention.
I'm monitoring this prominence
that's rotating onto the sun's disc.
♪♪
Yes, sir. This is sergeant glowacki,
calling from holloman solar observatory.
We, uh, have a prominence at north 19 on the east limb.
Thank you. Alright, bye.
♪♪
If this is prominence brews itself into a storm,
it could cause spectacular aurora,
but also power cuts and communication failures.
In six to eight hours, it could be facing earth,
and if it becomes eruptive, it can heavy impacts.
As the sun turns,
staff sergeant glowacki can only watch and wait.
Thankfully for all of us,
the prominence passes through earth's danger zone
without blowing,
and glowacki can finish his shift without issuing an alarm.
♪♪
Fortunately, solar storms that threaten power grids
are rare beasts, but the regular northern lights
that light up the arctic circle every night of the year
are just as capable of delivering mystery and awe.
♪♪
Hi, this is Chris cully with the university of calgary
ballooning in yellowknife, giving you a courtesy call.
Not far from Emma spanswick's cameras
on the frozen lake,
Dr. Chris cully of the university of calgary
is preparing to launch a high-altitude balloon.
Uh, we're about 20 minutes from launch here.
He's on a mission to understand
what's causing a very specific type of aurora.
The northern lights have a simple name,
but they actually come in a huge variety of distinct forms
that a trained spotter can identify,
just like a meteorologist
can pick out the structure of the clouds.
The aurora has a lot of different appearances
depending on where you're standing in relation
to the aurora.
Most of the time, what's going to happen
is that you'll see the discreet aurora off on the horizon.
When you see it like that,
it looks like a big, shimmering ribbon of light.
We typically describe those as curtains.
On the other hand, though,
if you're standing directly underneath that,
then you get a very different experience of it
because you see maybe one curtain that,
from your perspective, goes off that way,
another curtain that goes off that way,
and they all kind of converge down towards you,
and that's what we call the corona,
a crown of light that's kind of going out
in all sorts of different directions.
These fantastical patterns all originate
in the same processes, driven by the sun's solar wind,
but scientists know that's only half the story.
The aurora shapes, colors, and patterns can be vital clues
to understanding their real secrets.
Really a lot of what we're seeing over here, it's...
It's driven by processes that are deep,
deep out in space, that are...
That are tens and tens of thousands of kilometers
out in space.
Now Chris wants to discover the root cause
of a very special type of aurora
that seems to defy normal explanation.
Three to four hours after each night's main display has ended,
this different kind of aurora pulses across the night sky,
and nobody's sure why.
So, there's a mystery as to what exactly is causing
these pulsating aurora.
There's a lot of different theories.
What we're hoping is that this experiment is going to help us
narrow down and find which of those theories
is the one that really explains it.
Chris is launching a high-altitude balloon
to carry an X-ray detector into the upper atmosphere.
He believes that the strange force
that's driving the aurora's pulses
also creates X-ray pulses at the same time.
♪♪
This process happens over 16,000 miles from earth in deep space.
Scientists call it "chorus".
These are radio waves,
and it might be that these chorus waves
are the root cause of both the patchy,
pulsating aurora and the x-rays.
If Chris's balloon hears X-ray pulses at the same time
as he sees the pulses of light in the sky,
Chris can point the finger at chorus
as the mechanism driving them both.
So, this is the payload box.
This is what we're going to be actually flying.
This will hang underneath the parachute
and underneath the balloon.
To make the all-important measurements,
the payload has a perilous journey ahead,
and a lot can go wrong along the way.
♪♪
And a lot can go wrong along the way.
♪♪
In yellowknife, Canada,
physicist Chris cully is getting set to launch
a high-altitude balloon into the night sky.
The balloon will carry its highly sensitive instruments
20 miles up above the clouds
and almost all of the earth's atmosphere.
♪♪
Up here, the atmosphere is too thin to block out x-rays,
so Chris can measure the X-ray pulses in a way
that he never could from the ground.
Chris's only problem?
To retrieve the balloon, he'll need to track it across
more than 170 miles of Canada's frozen wilderness.
♪♪
The team have been working on the project for six months,
so a lot rides on the balloon delivering its data.
It's genuinely a nerve-racking moment for me right now.
There's a lot that can go wrong in the next six hours.
At 12:32 A.M., the team release the balloon.
Destination... unknown.
Alright, Matthew, we are up and away.
Can you give us a telemetry readout, please?
Roger that. You are looking good.
Vent rate is four.
GPS satellite, nine.
Telemetry is in agreement and being logged.
We are go. Repeat, we are go.
Thank you, Matthew.
That's a great feeling. Hearing that telemetry going back,
that means that everything is working fine,
and, uh... and we're go.
At first light the following morning,
Chris drives out to the local air strip
to begin a sub-zero scavenger hunt.
♪♪
But things haven't gone exactly to plan.
So, we had an anomaly last night
that depleted most of our battery,
which means that our main tracking actually switched off
The team needs to rely on the backup tracker,
which remains operational,
but it only provides one GPS coordinate.
There is no guarantee they will find their equipment.
After a nail-biting search by air and on foot,
the team finally makes contact with the payload.
Over 80 miles from the nearest human habitation,
Chris has completed this stage of his mission.
His next job?
To find out if he's got the data to solve his mystery.
♪♪
Back at base, Chris takes a first look at the data
his balloons captured.
This is a video of an all-sky camera
that was on during launch night,
and right around 4:30,
you see it in the image here as a flicker.
That's when the real, strong pulsating aurora showed up.
Now if you had been watching that in real life,
that would have been pieces of sky
that were sort of turning on, and then slowly turning off,
and just growing in intensity and fading,
and then another patch will grow in intensity
and fade in intensity, and that's the pulsating aurora.
Chris was hoping to show that the pulsating aurora
happen at the same time as the X-ray bursts,
and his data has proved him right.
These are... are very brief, little bursts of X-ray activity.
It only starts at about 4:30,
which is when that pulsating aurora showed up.
The arrival of the pulsating aurora
at the same time as these X-ray bursts
is new evidence
that suggests that the two events really are linked,
just like Chris thought.
He thinks that radio waves called chorus
in a region over 16,000 miles from earth
are driving both phenomena.
Chris thinks these waves act like a switch up in space,
turning on and off the pulses of light and x-rays
that Chris detected in his experiment.
It's a really different physical phenomenon
than what causes the nice, flowing arcs.
That's what's making this pulsating aurora.
Chris's new evidence links the x-rays
and the pulsating aurora tightly together.
It's a genuine scientific advance.
With every balloon that goes up, every rocket, every satellite,
we're... we're slowly pushing out the... the boundaries
of what we understand about the aurora
and about the bigger space system.
Ground-based cameras and balloons can help to unlock
the aurora's secrets on a local scale,
but for the full picture of the earth's aurora,
the hunt is going global.
This is the aurora borealis,
as seen from the international space station.
Yet even weightless astronauts can scan
only a fraction of the globe at a time.
For a better view, the camera must fly even higher.
Here, it reveals an oval band,
swinging around the nightward side of the earth's globe.
Only a force on an interplanetary scale
can create these lights, a force like the solar wind,
but what aurora hunters don't yet fully understand
is how this solar wind is born.
♪♪
Is how this solar wind is born.
♪♪
At the Goddard space center near Washington, D.C.,
NASA engineers are putting a unique spacecraft
through final testing.
♪♪
This is NASA's Parker solar probe mission.
It's going to be the first mission
to fly into the sun's corona.
At closest approach, we will be less than 4-million miles
from the surface of the sun.
Nicky fox has spent the past eight years
getting the Parker solar probe ready to fly.
We basically take her through a simulated space mission,
so we will take this spacecraft
to as hot as it will get on orbit
and also as cold as it will get on orbit.
The probe will deliver an unprecedented view of the sun.
It will soon head to cape canaveral for its launch.
This is the final big test that we do
before we ship down to the cape and get ready for launch.
The spacecraft's destination?
The most violent place in the solar system...
The sun's outer atmosphere,
its corona... One-million degrees hotter
than the sun's surface.
This is the birthplace of the solar wind,
the force that creates the northern lights.
♪♪
Every hour, billions of tons of matter erupt from the sun
into the depths of the solar system.
This so-called "solar wind" packs a powerful punch,
and has shaped the solar system for billions of years.
It helps create the beautiful tails of comets,
and because Mars has no protective magnetic field,
the solar wind stripped bare its atmosphere,
making a once wet world inhospitable for life.
The Parker solar probe will try to solve the mystery
of how this torrent of material streams away from the sun
and how that helps shape the aurora.
We don't fully understand how the solar wind is born.
We're not sure what physics are taking place in that region.
Using the data from Parker solar probe,
we will be able to fill in this missing piece,
and that will dramatically improve our ability
to see what happens on the sun
and predict what is going to happen at the earth.
The Parker solar probe is set
to make some extraordinary discoveries.
As it journeys to the sun,
the spacecraft will join a fleet of NASA satellites
called themis, already studying the solar wind.
Each of the spacecraft circle the earth in a different orbit.
♪♪
And aurora hunters are using their data to discover
exactly how the solar wind drives the northern lights.
♪♪
Back in the northwest territories,
Emma spanswick is receiving the first images
from her latest camera.
Yeah, the camera's up. It's... it's running so far.
All systems go.
She can combine these ground images with the data
streaming back from the themis space probes
to explain one of the northern lights' strangest behaviors.
♪♪
It's actually pretty weak right now,
but should enhance, I'm hoping, shortly.
Emma's struggling to get data
because the aurora are so hard to predict.
But her network of cameras
produces a continent-wide view
that captures the aurora whenever they happen.
What you're looking at here is the first night
in the history of the array where we had clear skies
all the way across Canada,
and it happened to be the geomagnetic storm,
and so we had perfect conditions, fantastic data.
It's an incredible event.
Syncing up these extraordinary images
with the data from the themis satellites
allows Emma to understand why the northern lights
appear exactly when they do.
Those satellites are taking detailed plasma measurements
of the actual space environment that's driving the aurora,
and together with the auroral images,
we can connect them and talk about the physics
that drives the aurora.
Combining the views from the ground and from space,
Emma now has a complete picture
of what causes the northern lights to burst into life.
♪♪
The charged particles of the solar wind
carry their own magnetic field.
As they plow into the earth's protective force field,
they stretch it out like an elastic band.
♪♪
It stretches and stretches
until it can no longer take the strain
and snaps back,
creating huge bursts of aurora in earth's upper atmosphere.
This cycle repeats continuously.
It dictates when the aurora's faint and when it's bright.
♪♪
We have very good ideas about the large-scale aurora,
things like that, the stuff that's really driven
by the solar winds, but a lot of mysteries remain.
♪♪
aurora hunters like Emma and Chris
are discovering what drives the northern lights,
but with every question answered,
a new, unexplained mystery appears on the horizon.
♪♪
In 2016, aurora chasers identified something
totally unexpected.
I've never seen this as a scientist before.
♪♪
I've never seen this as a scientist before.
♪♪
In 2016, a team of aurora hunters
spotted something they had never seen before...
A single band of bright, Violet light
stretching across the night sky.
Since the aurora chasers bagged themselves the discovery,
they also claimed the naming rights,
so they chose to call it "Steve",
just because they could.
Eric Donovan is an aurora hunter at the university of calgary.
He spent 30 years studying the northern lights,
and his latest mission is to find out what's causing Steve.
♪♪
He believes the light's color
could be the key to finding the answer.
I think a fire is a great way of thinking about the colors
of the northern lights.
Eric's campfire can help explain
why the northern lights shine with so many beautiful colors
because the same processes that make the flames glow
make the atmosphere light up the sky.
I've got this propane torch here,
and when I start it up, what you see is this blue flame,
and every time you burn propane, you're going to see that color.
One of the keys to a flame's color
is the material that's burning.
Different materials burn with different colored flames.
I've got one of these campfire color-packets,
and I'm going to toss it on here.
The mixture of material in here
has compounds that make blue and Violet and green lighting.
You start to see these fantastic colors that come out.
And the campfire sparkler... Copper chloride... burns blue.
And copper sulfate, green.
In just the same way, different gases high up in the atmosphere
produce the aurora's colorful displays.
So, if you look at the aurora, what you see are the colors
are layered... The Violet is at the bottom
of the auroral display,
and then if you go a little bit higher,
you start to see the green, and you go higher than that,
you start to see the red, and that layering is actually
telling us about the composition of the upper atmosphere
and the layering,
the structuring of the upper atmosphere.
The northern lights shine when particles
driven by the sun hit earth's upper atmosphere.
Just as different chemicals in a flame glow bright,
the gases in the atmosphere glow with different colors.
♪♪
Nitrogen glows Violet in a band at the bottom.
Above, oxygen's Greens and reds create a curtain
almost 250 miles deep.
And sensitive cameras can even reveal
streaks of hydrogen blue,
creating a magnificent ladder of color high into the sky.
♪♪
Eric can explain what causes the aurora's beautiful colors,
and he wants to use this knowledge to solve the mystery
of the strange phenomenon called Steve.
♪♪
Eric meets up with amateur aurora hunter Chris ratzlaff.
♪♪
Chris is a leading figure in the alberta aurora chasers,
a Facebook group with over 17,000 members
who first identified this new phenomenon.
So, this is Steve. This is one of the most interesting things
that our community has seen.
This is, of course, what got my attention,
and these marvelous photographs, these beautiful photographs...
I've never seen this as a scientist before.
This is not typical aurora,
this is something fundamentally and profoundly new for science.
♪♪
Dusk turns into night,
and Eric sets out the evening's plans
to use a special camera
that could split the aurora's light into its component colors.
This is a spectrum of the aurora,
and this really clear line in the middle of this
is the green line that comes from the oxygen.
- Hmm. - That's a fingerprint
for the chemistry and the physics that's going on.
If Chris can get the same kind of picture of Steve
with this camera,
Eric will be able to say what Steve is made of.
But the weather isn't looking good.
They decide to head northeast,
but the chances of seeing the northern lights tonight...
Let alone Steve... Are dropping by the minute.
♪♪
It's really killing us.
It's... it's looking like it's socked in right now.
I don't know that we're going to be able to find
any clear sky around here.
So we're not going to get any aurora.
We're not going to see Steve.
We're definitely not going to see Steve.
The night's hunt for Steve is a write-off,
so Chris and Eric need a new plan
to find out what Steve really is.
What we have to do now is get this thing
in the hands of one of your people when it's dark,
a really dark sky.
- Hm-mmm. - And when we have Steve,
a very bright Steve, and then we'll get a spectrum of that.
aurora chasers will continue their hunt for Steve,
and Eric hopes to show that Steve's unique color and form
are caused by a different process
than the one that powers the northern lights.
So, the big thing for me is that I... I think it's glow.
Like, I don't... I don't think it's...
You know, I think... I think it's actually the air is being
heated up and glowing,
and that's the kind of thing we'll be able to tell
from the spectrum.
Eric thinks Steve is a jet of particles
accelerated to such high speeds and high temperatures
that the jet begins to glow.
But until Chris and Eric can capture and decode its spectrum,
Steve's true identity will remain a mystery.
But scientists are also hoping to answer
an even bigger question.
If they can detect aurora in other parts of our solar system
and beyond, could it be a sign of life?
♪♪
And beyond, could it be a sign of life?
♪♪
Strange shapes lighting up the sky like Steve
sound like something from science fiction,
from an alien world.
But now, aurora hunters like gregg hallinan
really are looking for evidence of aurora
in other parts of the solar system
and even other parts of the galaxy.
And we have a telescope here that images the entire sky
every ten seconds,
looking for that signature radio emission
that those planets are experiencing an aurora.
aurora hunters are discovering
that aurora aren't confined to earth.
♪♪
Past the orbits of Mercury, Venus, earth, and Mars,
the solar wind meets Jupiter's magnetic field.
This is the largest structure in the solar system.
Jupiter's volcanic moon io
pumps it full with super-charged volcanic gas.
The gas is funneled down to Jupiter's atmososphere
and helps create aurora 100 times brighter than earth's.
♪♪
And Jupiter's light shows don't end there.
Its largest moon, ganymede, plows through this particle soup
and breathtaking aurora light up its poles.
♪♪
The discovery of aurora on other planets in our solar system
is strong evidence for an even more radical idea.
The big question is, can we detect those same aurora
on planets outside our solar system,
orbiting other stars?
At the long-wavelength array
in Owens valley, California,
gregg hallinan and marin Anderson
are on the hunt for alien aurora.
They believe that finding aurora on alien worlds may hold the key
to solving one of the greatest mysteries of the universe.
Does alien life exist?
When we're looking at other planets orbiting other stars,
we're looking for traces of atmospheric gases
that tells us there's life on those planets.
aurora offer us a shortcut.
On earth, most organisms on the planet
breathe oxygen in or out.
Gregg believes that if they find oxygen
on another planet's atmosphere, it could be a sign of life.
♪♪
When a planet experiences strong aurora,
suddenly the oxygen in its atmosphere starts to glow,
and that makes it so much easier to detect.
That might tell us for the first time
that we're sending an atmosphere like the earth's.
The earth-like planets gregg wants to find
are so far away, optical telescopes can't see them.
But aurora don't just shine with visible light.
They shine bright with radio waves, too.
So gregg uses radio telescopes like this
to look at distant planets,
and he spotted his first alien aurora.
We fondly refer to it as lsr j1835+3259.
Gregg's team has discovered the first-ever aurora
outside our solar system, 18 light years from earth.
This failed star glows with aurora
a million times more powerful than Jupiter's.
From its surface, its polar lights would shine
much brighter than daylight on earth.
Unfortunately, it shows no sign of harboring life.
♪♪
Scientists are only just beginning to learn
how to spot alien aurora.
♪♪
To catch an aurora as it flares on another world,
gregg and marin much watch all the nearest planets
in the sky all the time.
What we're trying to do here is use lots and lots of lots
of small antennas, and those small antennas
can see a lot more of the sky at any one time.
The problem is to have the same sensitivity as a big telescope,
we needs lots and lots more antennas...
Hundreds, even thousands.
Processing this data is a massive task.
So, there are 512 of these cables snaking through
the desert, each connecting to an antenna.
We're pushing as much data through our system
as about 10 million cds of data per day.
This is the most data-intensive telescope
operating on this planet.
Gregg's team hopes to use the Owens valley array
to catch a glimpse of all the glowing planets
in our galactic neighborhood.
♪♪
We want to observe every planet orbiting every star
out to 100 light years...
Literally, thousands of planets,
looking for radio emission produced by aurora
during geomagnetic storms.
Gregg hopes to produce a target list of worlds
that shine bright with the green glow of oxygen,
a list of worlds that shine bright
with the green glow of life.
♪♪
For centuries, the northern lights
have captured humanity's imagination
and mystified scientists,
but now we are closer than ever to decoding their secrets.
Some people say that by explaining the aurora,
then they... they somehow lose their magic, but I...
I don't believe that for a second.
To me, the beauty in the explanation just adds to it.
The northern lights are among the most awe-inspiring
natural wonders on planet earth...
♪♪
And also a reminder of the violence
that our solar system harbors.
When you see the aurora, it's like the fingers of the sun
reaching out and touching our own planet,
so you really are connecting in a very special way
with the sun when you see the aurora.
It makes you feel small.
It makes you feel like a small part of a...
Of a big, beautiful world.
I love that feeling.
That's the feeling that I still get
from watching the northern lights.
And now, as we look for aurora on other worlds,
it's a reminder that the more we learn about the northern lights,
the more we understand our place
in a magical, wonderful universe.
♪♪