Aurora is a narrative of discovery exploring the visual beauty, legends and science of the northern lights – including the developing threat of space weather – and challenging the popular paradigm of how the lights are formed. Well-known plasma physicist Dr Melanie Windridge offers new insights into this extraordinary and evocative phenomenon, a scientific marvel unlike any other in which the powers of astronomy, geology, magnetism and atomic physics combine to create one of the wonders of the natural world.

As products of solar ‘events’ with the power to disrupt and even knock out power and communications, the aurorae represent plasmic phenomena full of latent power and danger, and as we rely increasingly on technology the prospect of a huge solar storm becomes more and more threatening. This book grapples with both the beauty and the danger of the aurora, and it explores the essential questions of its origins. Do we really even know what causes this sublime phenomenon? The a