Miami – The northern lights may be visible again this Sunday night in parts of USAas has already happened in an unusual way in the last two days, given that the “elevated geomagnetic conditions” due to coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Sun persist.
“The ongoing geomagnetic storm is likely to become more intense again tonight”pointed out the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, in English) on social networks.
The rapid solar flares will therefore cause a new round of geomagnetic storms that will range from severe to extreme (G4 and G5), so the opportunity to see the northern lights continues today, before the activity decreases starting tomorrow.
If the forecast holds true, the phenomena of Friday night could occur tonight, when levels of similar geomagnetic storms generated sightings of the northern lights even in some regions of Mexico since Friday, something that is not common so far south.
In the Mid-Atlantic, skies will be mostly clear this Sunday night into Monday, which may facilitate promising views of the aurora from West Virginia to Washington D.C. and South Carolina.
NOAA indicated that coronal mass ejections from the Sun travel throughout the day at a speed of 1,800 kilometers per second to “collide with the Earth's magnetic field and reach our atmosphere.”
From the Canary Islands in Spain, off the African coast, and the megalithic monument of Stonehenge in the United Kingdom to Sonora in Mexico and Los Angeles and Chicago in the United States, numerous social media users shared images of illuminated skies on Friday night. with pinkish and greenish tones.
1 / 14 | This is how the northern lights were seen around the world. This image, provided by NASA, shows a solar flare, appearing as a bright flash at the bottom right, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory on May 9, 2024. (NASA/SDO via AP) – The Associated Press
According to the World Meteorological Organization, auroras consist of a luminous phenomenon in the upper layers of the atmosphere with shapes such as arcs, bands or curtains, at an altitude of between 90 and 150 kilometers, due to the interaction between the solar wind and the magnetic field of the earth.
For its part, NOAA, the United States scientific agency in charge of monitoring the conditions of the atmosphere and oceans, explained that a CME ejecta is an eruption of solar material that, when it reaches Earth, can produce a storm. geomagnetic, while a G5 alert is the maximum on a G1-G5 scale. EFE