What factors came together to give such a brilliant display of the northern lights last night?
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While the night sky should be cloud-free again, the northern lights aren’t expected to be as prominent in our skies tonight.
Given the ongoing solar storm peaked with G4 conditions last night (and a Kp index of 8) around 10 p.m, the strength of the storm is weakening. It will still be possible to see something, but the view will not be as pronounced, and isn’t expected to make it as far south as last night’s reports either, which spanned Texas, Florida and the Bahamas.
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So what factors came together to give such a brilliant display of the aurora borealis last night? That G4 is a severe geomagnetic storm, which is why the colors were visible to the naked eye, even in areas with a lot of light noise.
More on the northern lights
What happens is that the sun emits a coronal mass ejection, or CME. The one that was emitted from this storm was severe.
Then it interacts with our magnetosphere and those ions ride to the poles, making it into our atmosphere in places where we don’t have a strong magnetic field like we do facing the sun.
Once the ions are in, they interact with oxygen and nitrogen and produce the colors we see in the sky.
Friday night, it's possible you may see a pink glow, but it's unlikely we'll see the same kind of vibrancy or color range we did on Thursday.
