What creates the northern lights? I know it's something to do with the poles and their magnetic field. On my world I need northern lights that:
- Don't fade
- Can be seen all around the world
- Can be seen during the day
How can this be done?
What creates the northern lights? I know it's something to do with the poles and their magnetic field. On my world I need northern lights that:
How can this be done?
The Northern Lights, are the Auroras that occur in the Northern hemisphere of Earth. If your planet has them visible everywhere they would probably not be so colloquially named as "northern lights", and would be simply called auroras.
The basic cause of the auroras is interaction with solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere. On Earth the auroras are visible at lower latitudes (closer to the equator from both sides) during geomagnetic storms.
An artist's depiction makes such a storm look like the Sun dropping a hadouken the Earth:
The details would be difficult to work out, but it may be possible that the star in your system is particularly violent or the magnetic field of the planet is not very stable. This might allow auroras to be seen over most of the planet at night and during the day near the poles. Increasing the visibility to full-on auroras during the day would be more than a little alarming as a sign of rather epic amounts of solar radiation bombarding the planet.
You would need a ridiculously powerful star which is spewing out electromagnetic radiation all the time. In 1859, we got 'northern hemisphere [aurorae] even as far south as the Caribbean' due to the direct impact of a coronal mass ejection onto the magnetosphere, triggering the largest geomagnetic storm on record.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
However, if you want modern technology with that, you can't, since such a geomagnetic storm today would also fry everyone's computers and really, anything which uses electricity.
Scientifically, the response given by Samuel is entirely correct on a science basis — and honestly, the numbers of charged particles hitting the magnetosphere of the planet you're speaking of would be quite bad for life if it lasted forever.