Now here’s an awesome sight for you, folks–colliding auroras.

You know auroras, right? Those big bands of electromagnetic hoo-ha that make all the pretty colors in the upper atmosphere?  Yeah, those!  Well, apparently, the crew out at UCLA discovered something that no one had caught before now–sometimes auroras smack into each other, making those startling effects.  Dig the word:

“Our jaws dropped when we saw the movies for the first time,” said space scientist Larry Lyons of the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), a member of the team that made the discovery. “These outbursts are telling us something very fundamental about the nature of auroras.”

Like what?–you’re probably wondering right alongside me.  Well, one possibility is that auroras are a LOT bigger than anyone knew about.  That’s why NASA’s THEMIS project had to check and see, because if you’re down on earth looking up at it, it looks like a bunch of colored light.  But looking down from space shows a whole different picture–and that’s the picture we’ve got at right.

Cool, isn’t it?