Space Elevator

Amazing work! One minor correction:

> As particles from the sun hit the atmosphere, they excite the atoms in the air. These excited atoms start to glow, creating brilliant displays of light called auroras.

The process is a bit more nuanced than that. The modern mainstream understanding is that the growing pressure of the solar wind makes the tail of the magnetosphere "contract" (sort of pushing it inwards from the sides), which leads to reconnection of magnetic field lines. Once the reconnection occurs, the magnetic field lines that remain bound to the geomagnetic dipole accelerate the particles on them towards the Earth => they slam into the atmosphere, exciting the atoms and generating the aurora.

Right. So the solar wind provides the energy that drives the aurora, but it's more indirect than just "solar wind particles hit the atmosphere". Instead, the solar wind is injecting energy into the magnetic field of the magnetosphere, and when reconnection occurs some of this magnetic energy is dumped into particles in the magnetosphere, some of which can then strike the atmosphere.

Any discussion of aurora which do not mention space tornados: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tornado

Is inherently incomplete. Not necessarily because they're needed to explain it, but they do need to be brought up at any time possible because they're cool.

I feel that way about galactic center filaments. They just scream "this region of space is not safe" in the most awe-inspiring way to me. 150-lightyear-long, magnetically powered, speed-of-light tornados. And there's hundreds of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center_filament

https://science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/milky-way-center-meerkat...

These are cool. I wonder how much they screw with satellites etc.? How predictable are they? It seems like it's just a deadly, mostly-invisible wall of energy flying around at unbelievable speeds!

They basically only occur over the poles.