With their ethereal glow and swirling tendrils, auroras on Saturn are just as beautiful as even the most dramatic northern and southern lights here on Earth.

Newly released images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show an intense light show over the ringed planet’s north pole. The composite images of the auroras, taken over a seven-month period in 2017, were also made into a dramatic video.

It’s been known since the 1980s that Saturn has auroras, which occur when streams of charged particles emitted by the sun strike atoms in a planet's atmosphere.

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But the new images from Hubble — which has an unparalleled view of the solar system from its orbit more than 350 miles above Earth — afford the best view yet of auroras at the planet’s north pole, said Laurent Lamy, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory. Lamy is the lead researcher of a study about the auroras published online July 17 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

On Earth, auroras occur when the charged particles in what astronomers call the solar wind strike atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen molecules to produce displays of light at high latitudes. The displays occur regularly on Earth and are visible to the naked eye.