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50 free Aurora trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This aurora trivia quiz covers the northern and southern lights, from the physics that paints the sky to the myths people told about it. The easy questions handle the basics: what causes an aurora, why green dominates, where the name comes from, and where in the world you go to see one. The harder end goes deeper: the auroral oval and how it shifts with the solar wind, the 100-km altitude Carl Stormer measured, forbidden oxygen transitions, the 1859 Carrington Event that let telegraph operators work with the batteries switched off, the citizen scientists who named STEVE and spotted dune auroras, Birkeland currents, why Jupiter's auroras are powered by the volcanic moon Io, the brown dwarf with lights a million times brighter than ours, and the folklore of the Sami, the Maori and Aboriginal Australians. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our space, weather and astronomy quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What causes an aurora?
Solar particles hitting atoms in the upper atmosphere
The collisions excite oxygen and nitrogen, which then emit green, red and purple light.
Q 02What is the aurora in the Antarctic called?
The southern lights
Its features are almost identical to the northern lights and it changes in step with them.
Q 03The word 'aurora' comes from the Roman goddess of what?
The dawn
Borealis and australis come from Boreas and Auster, the Greco-Roman gods of the north and south winds.
Q 04Who used the term 'aurora borealis' in 1619, before Gassendi's 1649 description made it stick?
Galileo Galilei
The term entered the English language in 1828.
Q 05Which colour of aurora is the most common?
Green
It is emitted at 557.7 nm at altitudes where collisions are frequent and human eyes are most sensitive.
Q 06Red auroral light at the highest altitudes is emitted by which excited species?
Atomic oxygen
The 630 nm red line needs low particle density, because the excited atom can take up to two minutes to emit.
Q 07Blue and purple auroral emissions at the lower edges of the curtains come from what?
Molecular nitrogen
The dominant blue line is at 428 nm, and these fringes appear at the highest levels of solar activity.
Q 08Auroras are most commonly seen in a band centred on roughly which latitude, north and south?
67 degrees
The 'auroral zone' is about 6 degrees wide, and the lit region is pushed away from the geomagnetic pole.
Q 09What is the region currently displaying an aurora called?
The auroral oval
It sits about 15 degrees from the geomagnetic pole on the noon side and 23 degrees on the midnight side.
Q 10Carl Stormer's triangulation of 12,000+ auroras found their heights peaked at around what altitude?
About 100 km
None was below 70 km and only 6.5% were above 150 km.
Q 11Which of these is one of the five main auroral forms seen from the ground, according to Clark (2007)?
Coronas
The list runs from a mild glow through patches, arcs and rays to coronas that diverge from one point in the sky.
Q 12Discrete auroras can be bright enough to do what at night?
Read a newspaper
Arcs can fragment into rapidly changing rayed features that fill the whole sky.
Q 13Large geomagnetic storms that push auroras to lower latitudes are most common around the peak of what?
The 11-year sunspot cycle
Q 21Pulsating auroras flicker with periods of roughly how long?
2 to 20 s
They come with lower emission heights and above-average speeds of the Sun's particle flow, around 500 km/s.
Q 22Auroral kilometric radiation, discovered in 1972, is a strong radio emission at around what frequency?
150 kHz
Ionospheric absorption means it can only be observed from space.
Q 23What is the flow of magnetised hot plasma from the Sun that ultimately powers auroras called?
The solar wind
It reaches Earth at about 400 km/s and much faster during magnetic storms.
They stay frequent for about three years after the peak, when coronal mass ejections intensify the flow of particles from the Sun.
Q 14Which 1859 event, the greatest geomagnetic storm on record, brought auroras to the tropics?
The Carrington Event
Balfour Stewart at Kew Observatory linked the storm to Richard Carrington's white-light solar flare of 1 September.
Q 15During the 1859 storm, telegraph operators between Boston and which city ran on aurora current alone?
Portland, Maine
They disconnected their batteries and found the signal came through better than before.
Q 16A 1770 Japanese diary found in 2017 depicted auroras over which ancient capital?
Kyoto
In 620 AD, 'red pheasant tails' seen over Japan may likewise have been a red aurora.
Q 17In May 2024, solar storms made the aurora borealis visible as far south as Ferdows, in which country?
Iran
On rare occasions the northern lights reach the Mediterranean and the southern United States.
Q 18What does the citizen-science acronym STEVE stand for?
Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement
STEVE is not technically an aurora but a 25 km wide ribbon of 3,000 C plasma flowing at 6 km/s.
Q 19Citizen scientists from which country discovered the 'dune aurora', first reported in 2020?
Finland
The regularly spaced stripes are thought to be caused by an atmospheric wave modulating oxygen density.
Q 20Which aurora type is caused by positive particles and is too dim for the naked eye?
Proton
The proton grabs an electron and the resulting hydrogen atom emits the light.
Q 24Energy transfers most effectively from the Sun's plasma flow to Earth's magnetosphere when the interplanetary magnetic field points which way?
Southward
That lets its field lines connect with Earth's through magnetic reconnection.
Q 25Which Norwegian scientist developed a foundational theory of geomagnetism and auroras around 1900?
Kristian Birkeland
The field-aligned electric currents that feed bright auroras are named Birkeland currents after him.
Q 26Which two Swedes in Uppsala linked compass-needle fluctuations to an overhead aurora in 1741?
Anders Celsius and Olof Hiorter
It supported their theory that 'magnetic storms' were behind the wobbling compasses.
Q 27Benjamin Franklin's 1778 paper suggested auroras were caused by what?
Electrical charge concentrated in the polar regions
He imagined the charge, intensified by snow and moisture, breaking through the low atmosphere and running toward the equator.
Q 28Which mission's probes first pinned down the trigger of a magnetospheric substorm in February 2008?
THEMIS
Two of the five probes, about a third of the way to the Moon, caught the magnetic reconnection event.
Q 29Jupiter's main auroral ring is associated with plasma produced by which moon?
Io
Io's volcanism and ionosphere make it a powerful aurora source; auroras have even been seen over Io, Europa and Ganymede themselves.
Q 30Why do Venusian auroras appear as diffuse patches sometimes covering the whole disc?
Venus has no magnetic field
Electrons from the Sun simply hit the night-side atmosphere wherever they arrive.