Call it a Southern vacation for the Northern Lights.
They’re called the Northern Lights for a reason. Generally, the aurora borealis is confined to colder, northern territories where the radiation from the sun’s constant activity is more likely to affect the atmosphere. However, last night, the northern lights weren’t so northern. The aurora borealis was seen as far south as Mississippi, Alabama, and even Louisiana, and as far west as central California thanks to a massive corona mass ejection (or CME) that rippled through Earth’s atmosphere! Enjoy the beautiful light show while it lasts, because it’s a rarity.
So how do the northern lights become a southern night sensation? Well, basically, we’re headed towards a situation which NASA calls solar maximum, which means the sun is getting really active and there’s been an uptick in CME-type events and solar flares. What happened last night/this morning was a huge solar flare hitting the atmosphere of earth and getting significantly lower than normal. It’s not low enough to cause damage, but pretty low nonetheless.
According to the KP index, a scale scientists use to measure the strength of a geomagnetic storm, it takes about a 5 for a solar flare to potentially cause a light show the kind like we saw last night. Last night’s aurora borealis display was a 7 at its peak, so it was a pretty fierce solar flare that caused a lovely response in places where you could see the night sky.
Tags: astronomy, astronomical phenomena, aurora borealis, NASA Space Weather Center, space weather, CME, coronal mass ejection, Northern Lights, northern lights visible across the US, aurora borealis visible across the US, solar maximum, unusual events, solar light show, atmospheric light show, kp index, geomagnetic storm
