If you have ever had the opportunity to witness the pillars of light , we are sure that you will have been amazed first, and you will have tried to photograph them in the second instance. Still stunned by the phenomenon that nature offered you.
However, not everyone knows what pillars of light are and what their function is, so this is a good opportunity to find out.
As we said, it is a spectacle that takes place in the sky , one of the most extraordinary optical events that we can get to perceive with our eyes, such as the northern lights, although with the advantage that they only appear in arctic regions, with icy climates.
In any case, these can be produced as a visual show in which vertical lines of lights , as if they were pillars, emerge from the ground and into the sky, generating a very particular light reflection, suspended in the air for minutes.
In fact, sometimes they are known as solar pillars, because the light they reflect is the light of the Sun itself, which is below the horizon, already almost hidden from our senses. And there is some evidence that there may be pillars of light produced by moonlight.
As the pillars of light are classified within the family of halos, they allow an interaction with ice crystals, plates that take geometric shapes as they descend , replicating that luminosity, as if it were a mirror, while we remain absorbed in their presence.
This also explains why, as the crystals are larger, the more pronounced and visible at a distance is the phenomenon, thus affecting the radius in which it can be seen.
Many people, when they have a pillar of light in front of them for the first time, can confuse it with a beam of light, a very frequent error considering certain characteristics in common.
But in them their location is neither above nor below a light source, which is exactly what happens with the light beam, and what helps to distinguish them.
Beyond that, scientists still have doubts about how pillars of light occur, and while they have been able to come up with basic answers to their questions, they still have uncertainties that have not been cleared. Surely, with future research, more can be found out.
