There may be a new opportunity. In the early hours of Saturday to Sunday, the intense geomagnetic activity experienced last night is expected to persist, according to the State Meteorological Agency (AEMET).
“Tonight the northern lights could be observed again, especially in areas without artificial lighting and with cameras that allow long exposure,” reads the publication in X.
“A dream come true”, this is how many users of the social network Canary Islands.
A solar storm of category between G4 and G5, unprecedented in the last 20 years (the last one occurred in October 2003), has been responsible for this extremely unusual event.
The solar physicist from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) Héctor Socas has indicated that the phenomenon could be seen for one or two more nights.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, the northern lights are luminous phenomena that appear in the upper layers of the atmosphere in the form of arcs, bands, or curtains.
Unlike normal weather phenomena, auroras form much higher in the troposphere, usually at an altitude of between 90 and 150 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.
Auroras are due to the interaction between electrically charged particles ejected from the sun (the solar wind) with rarefied gases in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and are mainly observed in arcs close to the two magnetic poles of the Earth (the auroral ovals).
But if solar activity is very intense, as it is currently, coronal mass ejections or atmospheric solar flares can intensify the solar wind and reach the Earth’s magnetosphere, triggering geomagnetic storms.
During these phenomena, the auroral oval temporarily widens, allowing auroras to be perceived from lower latitudes, as happened last night, giving rise to spectacular images of northern lights throughout Spain, from Catalonia to the Canary Islands, passing through Extremadura or Andalusia that were captured by the objectives of scientific institutions and amateurs.
Despite the great expectation they generate, the northern lights still present many unknowns for science.
To help solve them, a balloon expedition of four Spanish scientists begins next Monday with the aim of recording the northern lights from the atmosphere, at about 30 kilometers altitude and starting from the frozen lake of Inari (Finland).
Recording from the atmosphere offers several advantages; the first is located above the troposphere, where most of the clouds are concentrated, so much clearer and more precise images could be obtained.
In addition, being closer to the ionosphere (the layers of the atmosphere above 80 km) could provide more precise measurements of the charged particles and electric fields associated with auroras.
This year, the Sun registers a maximum of activity (in a cycle that lasts 11 years) and the month of May, being close to the equinox, is the moment in which, due to the position of the planet’s axis of rotation, produces greater penetration of the solar wind into the Earth’s magnetosphere.
