Some people talk about being able to see other peoples auras. Wikipedia have an artical on auras. Whether that’s true or not, I thought that I’d write a little bit about the physics behind auras (or perhaps just my own best guess of what makes an aura occur).

In any atom, there are protons, neutrons and electrons. The protons and neutrons form the nucleus while the electrons orbit around (much like the earth around the sun). The orbiting electrons can be energised (given an energy boost) and start orbiting at a higher level (in the Earth/Sun analogy, this is like the Earth starting to orbit at the same distance from the sun as Mars).

Eventually, these ‘excited’ eletrons fall back down to their original orbit. When they fall back down, they release energy. This energy is released as a photon (a ‘particle’ of light). See the following web pages for further details on how this works.

A page from Nasa.

Another page from some American university.

And another one from How Stuff Works.

So now we know that electrons can emit light energy without much intervention from anyone or anything in particular.  If this occurs in all atoms, then as the electrons in the human body fall back to their original energy levels, they will emit light energy.

This could well be the ‘Aura’ that people talk about being able to see.