Northern Lights Are Seen in Places Where They Normally Aren’t

NYT SCIENCE: Northern Lights Are Seen in Places Where They Normally Aren’t
By Livia Albeck-Ripka and Derrick Bryson Taylor
Section: Science
Source: New York Times
Published Date: April 24, 2023 at 03:00AM

The lights, driven by a large burst of energy from the sun, illuminated an unusually wide area across North America and Europe and may be visible again on Monday night.

The sky over an unusually wide swath of the northern hemisphere lit up with a brilliant display of color overnight into Monday morning, dazzling people across North America and Europe.

The display was potentially visible as far south as Iowa in the United States, as well as in parts of southern England, scientists said.

The phenomenon, known as the aurora borealis or northern lights, occurs when particles emitted by the sun collide with particles that are already trapped around Earth’s magnetic field, and can often be seen from parts of Iceland, Canada and Alaska.

But on Friday, the sun let off a large burst of energy, said Robert Steenburgh, a space scientist with the Space Weather Prediction Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (These bursts are also known as coronal mass ejections.)

“The sun spit off a big blob of plasma,” Mr. Steenburgh said. The burst of energy, which has its own magnetic field, had been moving through space and reached Earth’s magnetic field on Sunday, when the two collided to create a geomagnetic storm, he said. “It got our magnetosphere pretty revved up.”

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/science/northern-lights-aurora-borealis.html