Brian McDonald
A series of powerful solar storms colorful skies across the Northern Hemisphere this weekend as people witnessed brilliant displays of the northern lights in the United States, Canada, Europe, China and beyond. Officials said the dazzling light shows could continue for a few more days.
O Northern Lights – the phenomenon more commonly known as the aurora borealis – occurs because of a molecular collision in the upper levels of Earth’s atmosphere that causes the release of explosions of energy in the form of visible light. The aurora borealis has a counterpart, the aurora australis, or northern lights, which is the same phenomenon in the southern hemisphere. These light shows can be visible for half the year in certain locations close to either of the planet’s two poles, but it is uncommon to see them in areas closer to the equator, which is why shows about North AmericaEurope and other places at similar latitudes have been a great pleasure these past few days.
The aurora will extend from the poles toward the equator during periods of intense space weather activity, and has been known in the past to reach as far as the continental United States when the activity is particularly extreme. That’s what happened over the weekend, when an unusually strong geomagnetic storm hit Earth and set the stage for a series of explosive night scenes around the world. The geomagnetic storm that arrived on Friday was a historic G5the highest level on a rating scale that starts at G1, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A solar storm of this size has not made contact with Earth in decades. It arrived amid a parade of coronal mass ejections — eruptions of magnetic field and other solar material from the solar corona that can cause geomagnetic storms — that continued to fuel the northern lights shows throughout Friday and Saturday. The next bursts of solar material are expected to reach Earth Sunday noonaccording to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, which has issued a geomagnetic storm warning in anticipation of G4 or G5 events likely following upcoming coronal mass ejections.
“Clocks at this level are very rare,” the Space Weather Prediction Center said in a statement Saturday. He noted that approaching solar activity could potentially cause the aurora “to become visible across much of the northern half of the country, and perhaps as far south as Alabama to northern California.”
Ahead of the next round of solar flares, here are some bright auroras that have materialized so far this weekend in different parts of the world.
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Robert F. Bukaty/AP
Owen Caputo Sullivan/AP
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VCG/VCG via Getty Images
