Description | Phillips speculates on the formation and motion of auroral arches. Since it has been found by experiment that the maximum length of the voltaic arc with a given battery is nearly the same in atmospheric air and in highly rarefied air, forming a very perfect vacuum, the author conceives that a streamer begins as a disruptive discharge of finite and very moderate length, (the maximum length very nearly of a continuous discharge,) which starts upwards from the auroral arch, which he regards as the discharging train. If this first portion is not parallel to the dipping-needle, it is moved laterally by virtue of the Earth’s magnetism, and thus wrenched from the spot where it was formed, and extinguished.
Marked on front as 'Withdrawn'.
Subject: Electricity / Electromagnetism
Received 7 March 1856. Communicated by George Gabriel Stokes.
This paper was published in full in volume 8 of Abstracts of the Papers Printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London [later Proceedings of the Royal Society] as 'On the aurora'. |