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Jago is an ex-TV documentaryproducer who came across Birkeland’s story while making theBBC series The Planets. While many scientists had postulated arelationship between the Sun and the aurorae (due to the frequentcoincidence of aurorae with sunspots), the first scientist toprovide a comprehensive and substantially correct explanation ofthe mechanism by which this happened was the Norwegian physicistKristian Birkeland (1867-1917), the subject of Lucy Jago’sbook, The Northern Lights.

We are so familiar with the idea of the AuroraBorealis, and its southern counterpart the Aurora Australis,being a manifestation of the Sun’s electromagnetic influenceon the Earth, that it is sometimes easy to imagine that thisunderstanding is as old as Newton’s laws of motion, whichdescribed the Sun’s gravitational influence on our planet.In fact, experimental confirmation of the idea that chargedparticles from the Sun are energetic enough to reach the Earthhas only come in the space age, from research satellites whichdetected the solar wind and established that the whole solarsystem is, in effect, bathed in the Sun’s outer atmosphere. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001 New York: AlfredA.