Northern Lights May 11th 2024
This may sound like science fiction, but this is no movie. Dancing ribbons of light, scientifically known as aurora and often called the Northern Lights, are painting the night sky across the U.S. and around the world. Considered the holy grail of skywatching, people often travel thousands of miles to see this rare phenomenon, typically only visible in the winter months and near the earth's magnetic poles. Think Scandinavia, Iceland, Finland, the far north in Alaska. But a rare solar storm is painting the skies across wide swaths of the U.S. with bold hues of green, purple and red. The Northern Lights are expected to beam as far south as Northern California to Texas to North Carolina. "This is an unusual and potentially historic event," Clinton Wallace, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, said in a release. What's causing this rare light show? NOAA space weather forecasters have observed at least seven coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the sun. CMEs are explosions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun’s corona. This epic blast of solar wind can cause geomagnetic storms when they are directed at Earth. In other words, explosions of particles from the sun have been blasted into space. NOAA says this mass eruption of solar material is very rare. The last time an extreme geomagnetic storm hit earth in such a massive way was in 2003.
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