I was wondering about the differences between the Northern vs. Southern lights: will one pole collect the positive charges, and the other the negatives? I know that the solar wind is composed mainly of protons & alpha particles vs. electrons. It is also known to be of an overall neutral charge.
I would intuitively expect that the positive particles will go one way, and the negative particles (electrons) will go the opposite way, as per Lorentz force.
However, I suspect this is not the case. What am I missing? I can think of the following:
- Separating the positives and the negatives will upset the neutral electric charge.
- The solar wind itself is already magnetized, hence, it might not be as straight-forward as "a clod of particles going somewhere uniformly", but rather, some sort of internal turbulence also occurs.
- The strength of the solar wind's magnetic field is not negligible when compared to the Earth's, hence the local magnetic field felt by the particles isn't static.
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