Nature’s light show just played a sold-out gig

The Northern Lights, aka aurora borealis, were visible across the northernmost 30 US states over the past two nights, as a result of specific solar activity that occurred late last week (and surprisingly not magic).

🌌 Some quick background: The Northern and Southern Lights are caused by activity on the surface of the Sun – specifically, solar storms that eject huge clouds of electrically charged particles, which can then collide with the Earth. Or to oversimplify: the sun vomits charged particles in every which direction, and some eventually hit Earth.

• Most of these charged particles are deflected away upon impact, like a girl who’s working on herself but keeps getting hit on by hopeful suitors, though some are captured by the Earth’s magnetic field and attracted to its north and south poles.
• As these charged particles accelerate towards the poles, they slam into atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, heating them up and leaving a trail of glowing colored light across the sky. This visual phenomenon is what we call the Northern and Southern Lights.

🤔 Bottom line: The reason why the lights were so widely visible this go-around is rooted in an event that happened last Friday. That was when the Sun let off an unusually large burst of plasma, called a coronal mass ejection. Part of this plasma burst collided with Earth on Sunday night, resulting in charged particles (aka the Northern and Southern Lights), appearing closer to the equator than usual on Sunday and Monday evenings.