A severe geomagnetic storm created auroras that were visible as far south as Arizona in the U.S.
Night skies across the U.S. danced with streaks of green and magenta this past week. People as far south as Asheville, N.C., and Phoenix, Ariz., had the unexpected pleasure of witnessing the Northern Lights.
“I think that the magnitude of what happened last week was a bit of a surprise—which tells you a lot about our actual understanding of what’s going on,” McIntosh says. Normally, the lights occur within the “auroral ovals” that encircle the Arctic and Antarctic. But during severe storms, these particles can travel farther from the poles, expanding the auroral oval to encompass more of the globe. On Halloween in 2003 the ghostly lights appeared as far south as Florida. In September 1859, during the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded, auroras lit up the Caribbean.
MacDonald strongly encourages anyone who witnessed one of the auroras to report that observation to Aurorasaurus, a citizen science project she helps run. The goal is to use sightings gathered from the public to get better at predicting when and where the elusive phenomena will appear. The main cause of the storm was a “fairly impressive” eruption on the surface of the sun called a coronal mass ejection, says Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. These eruptions belch out giant loops of plasma. The recent coronal mass ejection’s effect may also have been amplified by another solar phenomenon observed last week, called a coronal hole, says W.
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