Sometimes, after idling in the sky for hours as a greenish glow,
the aurora catches fire, erupting toward the magnetic north pole
in magnificent chaos that can last for three hours. "Substorms,"
as space physicists call them, can happen two or three times
each night. The man who came up with that name half a century
ago has, with a former student he once mentored, come up with a
new theory on the location of heavenly energy for these auroras.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu first heard the word aurora from his mother,
who sang it to him in a lullaby. He would not see the phenomenon
until he was 28, when in the late 1950s he traveled from Japan
to the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska
Fairbanks. He has been here ever since. During much of his six
decades in the far north, he has pondered the complicated
mechanisms that trigger the aurora. But there was a 20-year gap
in Akasofu's academic pursuits when he served first as director
of the Geophysical Institute and then the International Arctic
Research Center,