Northern Lights Dazzle U.S. Skies after Powerful Solar Storm

See Photos of the Northern Lights That Dazzled the U.S.

By Meghan Bartels edited by Andrea Thompson

On Tuesday night sky watchers across the U.S. were treated to a phenomenal aurora display, the product of a severe geomagnetic storm triggered by a recent burst of solar activity.

Auroras were visible in areas that included Indiana, New Jersey, northern California, Florida and Texas. That is remarkably far south for the northern lights, or aurora borealis, which are typically restricted to a doughnut surrounding the North Pole.

The southern lights, or aurora australis, were also visible in parts of Australia.

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According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, which forecasts the effects of solar activity on Earth and its surroundings, geomagnetic storm conditions are expected to continue at a somewhat lower level.

And the event isn’t over yet. Auroras occur after the sun emits what scientists call a coronal mass ejection, or CME, in the direction of Earth. A CME is essentially a blob of the plasma and magnetic field that makes up our star. When this material interacts with the gases in Earth’s atmosphere, the resulting energy transfers light up the skies.

Last night’s auroras were the result of CMEs released on Sunday and Monday, but Tuesday also saw such an outburst from the sun, and experts expect it will reach Earth in the coming hours. An initial aurora forecast for tonight suggests the spectacle could continue tonight only for a more northern portion of the country.

Auroras are part of a class of phenomena dubbed space weather and are both the prettiest and the least harmful example. Other types of space weather can be dangerous to technology in orbit and even to the power grids that sustain modern life on Earth. And the current space weather activity has had a perhaps surprising side effect: delaying today’s scheduled launch of a Blue Origin rocket that will carry a pair of NASA spacecraft bound to study space weather at Mars.

Whether or not you were able to catch sight of an aurora, consider submitting your observations to the volunteer science project Aurorasaurus. Through this program, scientists and sky watchers team up to understand the what the effects of specific space weather events are, as well as how auroras work more generally.

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