The Northern Lights could light up our skies again as early as next month.
Skies over the UK turned pink and green last weekend as the Northern Lights produced incredible displays for skygazers.
The spectacle came after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US issued its first severe solar storm warning since 2005 as a series of solar flares combined to form a huge burst of solar plasma.
“We had a quite enormous sunspot, about 15 times the size of the Earth, on the Earth-facing side of the sun,” said Krista Hammond, a space weather expert at the Met Office.
“It was releasing a lot of solar flares and coronal mass ejections which are enormous eruptions of charged particles.”
A number of the eruptions caught up with each other, which meant that by the time they arrived on Earth, the resulting geomagnetic storm was much stronger than any of the individual eruptions would have caused in isolation.
“The last time we saw a geomagnetic storm of this magnitude was back in 2003,” said Ms Hammond.
The sun is in the most active period of its 11-year cycle, which means we could get another chance to see the Northern lights in the next few weeks.
“The sunspot region, which gave all the solar flares and the coronal mass ejections, is now rotated round to the other side of the sun which isn’t facing the Earth,” Ms Hammond said.
“But in a couple of weeks’ time, that area will start to rotate back around to face the Earth again.”
The lights, or aurora borealis, appear in the sky when electrically charged particles from the sun travel across space and collide with Earth’s atmosphere.
