"The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dancer. Lyra thought she could even hear them: a vast distant whispering swish."

This is Philip Pullman's description of the aurora borealis in his award-winning novel, "Northern Lights." The little girl Lyra, seeing the lights for the first time, is moved almost to tears by their beauty and wonders to herself: What makes the aurora glow? (She also thinks that she can hear noise from the lights, but more of that later.)

The mystery of what powers the aurora was essentially solved by the pioneering Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland about 100 years ago. Birkeland demonstrated that the solar wind, a massive flux of protons and electrons streaming out of the sun, interacted with the Earth's magnetic field to create the atmospheric illuminations. His ideas caught on all over Europe, except for England.