Here's a story: Imagine there's an invisible force field around our planet.
Now imagine that for billions of years, that force field has been protecting us from a beam of supercharged plasma that would otherwise wipe out life on Earth as we know it.
You might think this is some kind of science fiction story, but it's all true.
And it's what gives us this: The aurora!
The auroras are one of mankind's oldest mysteries, and we've come up with some crazy theories of how to explain it along the way.
Take Aristotle, he thought they aurora was the sky vomiting little bits of flames!
But it wasn't until the 1600's that we figured out two key things that helped us explain the aurora.
One, the Earth is really just one big magnet, and second, it turns out the sun gives of a lot more than just light.
Long before any sunlight hits Earth, it's born at the edge of the Sun.
And the edge of the Sun, the corona, is a busy, beautiful place, full of churning whirlpools of plasma and huge magnetic arcs.
