A series of eruptions on the Sun have sparked colorful Northern Lights into middle-latitudes of the United States. A pair of blasts over the weekend will arrive Monday and Tuesday, producing more upper-atmosphere storminess.
On Nov. 7th this storm sparked Northern Lights as far south as Oklahoma, Utah and California in the United States," said Paal Brekke, the European Space Agency's Deputy Project Scientist for the sun-watching SOHO spacecraft. "More auroras are possible on Nov. 8th and 9th when a pair of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are due to hit Earth's magnetic field."
Coronal mass ejections are billowing bubbles of hot gas typically associated with solar flares, which are explosions of light and other radiation. Both weekend storms were the result of eruptions near the large sunspot 696.
The Nov. 6 eruption was a medium-strength classified an M-7 solar flare. The Nov. 7 flare was an X-1. All X-class flares are major, with higher numbers used to not stronger events.
The first coronal mass ejection was captured in this
view by SOHO
(Solar and Heliospheric Observatory). The Sun's main disk is blocked out so
the camera can view the otherwise hard-to-see eruption as it expands into space.
Forecasters with the Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colorado say skywatchers into middle latitudes may again see Northern Lights through Tuesday. The colorful sky lights are created when charged particles created by the space storms race toward Earth's poles and the planet's magnetic field lines, then excite molecules high in the atmosphere.
-- Robert Roy Britt
Credit: SOHO/NASA/ESA
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