By Michael Goodspeed
The day of this writing, December 13, 2007, is the 140th anniversary of the birth of the Norwegian-born physicist Kristian Birkeland. It was Birkeland who correctly hypothesized in the early 20th century that electric currents from the Sun power the earth's auroras. For many decades, the scientific mainstream largely rejected Birkeland’s thesis, favoring instead the idea that Earth's magnetosphere is an impenetrable envelope, "squeezed" by the solar wind to induce auroral activity. Only when satellites detected the magnetic signatures of electric currents in the aurora in 1973 was Birkeland's hypothesis irrefutably validated -- Read the article
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