Aurora Trivia
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48 free Aurora trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 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 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What causes an aurora?
Solar particles hitting atoms in the upper atmosphere
Solar particles hitting atoms in the upper atmosphere make the thin gas glow much as electricity lights a neon sign, which is why the biggest displays follow eruptions on the Sun.
Q 02Why can the northern lights almost never be seen from the Arctic in midsummer?
The sky never gets dark enough
The sky never gets dark enough under the midnight sun: the aurora carries on overhead but only shows against a dark sky, and displays tend to peak around the spring and autumn equinoxes.
Q 03The word 'aurora' comes from the Roman goddess of what?
The dawn
The dawn is what the lights resembled to Europeans far from the Arctic, who usually saw only a faint reddish glow low in the north, as if the Sun were about to rise in the wrong place.
Q 04Who is often credited with coining the term 'aurora borealis' in a 1619 treatise published under a pupil's name?
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei wrongly took the lights for sunlight bouncing off the high atmosphere; Pierre Gassendi, sometimes given the credit instead, used the name in a 1649 account of a 1621 display.
Q 05Which colour of aurora is the most common?
Green
Green dominates, though often less vividly than photos suggest: long camera exposures record colour in displays that look pale, or even invisible, to the people standing beneath them.
Q 06Which gas emits the deep red light sometimes seen at the very top of an aurora?
Atomic oxygen
Atomic oxygen needs about two minutes undisturbed to release its red light, so the colour survives only in the near-vacuum at the top of a display; lower down, collisions snuff it out first.
Q 07The purple fringe sometimes seen along the lower edge of an aurora's curtains is emitted by which gas?
Molecular nitrogen
Molecular nitrogen is so stable that it rarely splits into atoms, so it glows as whole molecules, and its purple hem shows up only in the most intense displays.
Q 08Which Norwegian city sits in the auroral zone, where the northern lights appear most often?
Tromsø
Tromsø lies beneath the band the lights form around the magnetic pole, so displays there can pass straight overhead, and the town has had an auroral observatory since the 1920s.
Q 09What do scientists call the glowing band that an aurora traces around the pole when seen from space?
The auroral oval
The auroral oval swells toward the equator when a solar storm hits, which is why forecasters map it to tell people far from the poles when to look up.
Q 10Carl Størmer triangulated thousands of auroras with cameras across Norway and found most glowed at about what altitude?
About 100 km
About 100 km up is roughly where space is said to begin; Størmer, a pure mathematician, owed his method to a student hobby of secretly snapping Oslo passers-by with a hidden camera.
Q 11Which name describes auroras seen from directly below, their rays fanning out from one point overhead?
Coronas
Coronas are a trick of perspective: the rays are tall parallel columns of light, and seen from underneath they appear to converge the way railway tracks do in the distance.
Q 12The very brightest auroras have reportedly given enough light to do what at night?
Read a newspaper
Read a newspaper is what people in the north-eastern United States did by the great aurora of 1859, a display so bright that others got up and started their morning chores, sure the Sun was rising.
Q 13Large geomagnetic storms that push auroras to lower latitudes are most common around the peak of what?
Q 21Comet tails always point away from the Sun, a clue that led scientists to predict which particle flow that also powers auroras?
The solar wind
The solar wind was worked out on paper in 1958 by Eugene Parker, whose referees called the idea absurd; the journal's editor printed it anyway, and a Soviet Moon probe detected the flow within months.
Q 22Earth's magnetic field points north, so auroras tend to flare when the magnetic field arriving from the Sun points which way?
Southward
Southward is the word aurora chasers wait for: opposite fields link up like two bar magnets snapping together and let the Sun's particles pour in, while a northward field mostly slides past.
Q 23Which Norwegian physicist made artificial auroras by firing electrons at a magnetised globe in a vacuum chamber around 1900?
The 11-year sunspot cycle
The 11-year sunspot cycle is at heart a magnetic one: near each peak the Sun's two magnetic poles swap places, and the eruptions that drive great storms multiply.
Q 14Which 1859 event, the greatest geomagnetic storm on record, brought auroras to the tropics?
The Carrington Event
The Carrington Event is named for the English amateur astronomer who, sketching sunspots the morning before, saw two patches of white light flare over them: the first solar flare ever recorded.
Q 15A scholar's diary helped researchers reconstruct a vast red aurora that filled the sky in 1770 over which old Japanese capital?
Kyoto
Kyoto lies so far from the pole that an aurora overhead means an extreme storm; the diarist noted where the red light sat against the Milky Way, and that let researchers rate it on a par with 1859's.
Q 16Why did some American farmers stop planting during the May 2024 solar storm that spread auroras worldwide?
Their tractors lost GPS guidance
Their tractors lost GPS guidance: self-steering rigs need inch-level satellite fixes to plant straight rows, and the storm scrambled them days before the Midwest's mid-May deadline for corn.
Q 17Which first name did Alberta aurora chasers give a mysterious purple ribbon of light, borrowing it from the film Over the Hedge?
Steve
Steve is what the film's animals call a hedge that appears overnight, to make it less frightening; scientists later bent the name into an acronym, Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.
Q 18Finnish hobbyists who spotted a new aurora form, a row of evenly spaced stripes, named it after which landscape feature?
Dunes
Dunes were missing from an aurora guidebook a Helsinki physicist had just written for the hobbyists, and they told her so; photos they then took at the same moment from two towns let her team measure the stripes' height.
Q 19Electrons cause most auroras, but which other particle from space produces a fainter kind usually invisible to the naked eye?
Proton
Proton auroras glow by theft: each incoming proton steals an electron, turns into a hydrogen atom and gives off light of its own, spread too thinly for most eyes to notice.
Q 20Pulsating auroras are faint patches that blink on and off, with each cycle lasting roughly how long?
2 to 20 s
2 to 20 s is the beat of 'chorus' waves far out in Earth's magnetic field, so called because they sound like chirping birds as audio; each chirp knocks a burst of electrons down into the air.
Kristian Birkeland
Kristian Birkeland paid for his aurora work with inventions, among them an electric cannon that short-circuited and spat flames before an invited Oslo audience in 1903.
Q 24Which Swedish astronomer, working with his assistant Olof Hiorter, noticed in 1741 that compass needles swung when an aurora was overhead?
Anders Celsius
Anders Celsius also built the thermometer that bears his name, but upside down: he put 0 at boiling and 100 at freezing, and the scale was flipped only after his death in 1744.
Q 25Benjamin Franklin wrote a paper suggesting that auroras were caused by what?
Electrical charge concentrated in the polar regions
Electrical charge concentrated in the polar regions was a natural guess for the man of the kite and the lightning rod, and he was half right: the lights are electrical, though the charge arrives from the Sun.
Q 26Which NASA mission, named for a Greek goddess, used five probes to settle what triggers the substorms that brighten auroras?
THEMIS
THEMIS was named for the Greek goddess of justice because it had to judge between two rival theories; its probes caught magnetic field lines snapping a third of the way to the Moon about a minute and a half before the lights flared.
Q 27Jupiter's main auroral ring is associated with plasma produced by which moon?
Io
Io's volcanoes throw debris into space, and Jupiter's fast-spinning magnetic field whips it up and channels it toward the poles, so these lights can shine without any help from the Sun.
Q 28Why do Venus's faint auroras spread in patches across its night side instead of circling the poles?
Venus has no magnetic field
Venus has no magnetic field of its own to steer incoming particles toward the poles, so they strike the night-side air wherever they arrive; the light is so weak that some scientists dispute calling it an aurora.
Q 29Earth's auroras circle the poles, but where did Mars Express spot the first aurora ever detected on Mars?
Over magnetised patches of crust
Over magnetised patches of crust in the southern hemisphere: Mars lost its global magnetic field long ago, but old rock still holds traces of it, and the glow seen there in 2004 was only about 30 km wide.
Q 30On which planet do X-ray auroras occur on the surface rather than in an atmosphere?
Mercury
Mercury has almost no air, so electrons raining in from space slam straight into bare rock and make the ground itself give off X-rays, a process the BepiColombo probe caught during a 2021 flyby.