Have you looked up at the night sky recently? If you have then maybe you’ve noticed the Northern lights, or maybe the area you live in is too light-polluted. But throughout this week the Northern lights will be able to be seen as far down south as Virginia. But why is this happening?
Solar Storms
The Sun is the main cause of the Northern lights, all of those colors you look up at with your eyes aren’t magical dust, it's radiation that can rip apart our Earth’s atmosphere taking all of our oxygen and water with it. The radiation comes from our Sun which is the reason for life on Earth, but it can also take it away. The radiation comes from something called a solar flare, which happens when a part of the Sun erupts and sends a blast of radiation our way. But don’t worry the Sun’s radiation won’t be able to hurt us for a long time. You can thank Earth’s core for that, the core of our home planet generates an electromagnetic shield that repels the radiation hundreds of miles away from our atmosphere. The Sun’s radiation meets two different fates from there, the first way is that it simply bounces off the electromagnetic force like a pebble hitting a steel shield. The alternative way is for them to get torn up into non-existence. Everything has a weak point, and in the case of Earth’s core, it has its North and South poles. The radiation can get closer to Earth’s atmosphere than radiation facing it head-on but is eventually blocked. Because it is closer to Earth’s atmosphere we can observe the particles being torn up at the poles of Earth.
An Unexpected Brust
On Tuesday (May 14) our Sun emitted an unusually large amount of radiation. NASA classifies the solar flares based on how strong they erupt and graded it a type X-3, which is equivalent to about 10 billion nuclear bombs. It was the largest flare in 21 years according to NASA.
Since the Solar Flare had a huge amount of radiation a larger amount was able to get down to Earth’s northern pole, which caused the Northern Lights to move South. Resulting in Northern Lights being visible in Pennsylvania.
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