Aurora borealis, or the northern lights, were seen in the U.S. as far south as Florida after a severe geomagnetic storm hit the planet.
Rare images of the colorful phenomena, which are typically visible in far northern regions within 1,550 miles of the North Pole, flooded social media on Thursday night amid the G4 solar storm.
“Get outside everyone, even Florida!!” photographer and storm chaser Mike Theiss wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “A strong northern lights event is happening right now. Find somewhere that is dark and look to your north.”
“Levels are now approaching G5 Solar Storm conditions—higher than what we saw with the May Aurora,” explained Jamie Arnold, meteorologist for South Carolina NBC affiliate WMBF. “The show may get even better later this evening. Northern lights now being reported as far south as Florida.”
Meteorologist Shea Gibson shared to X two photos of the northern lights visible near Charleston, South Carolina, while Good Morning Connecticut co-anchor Laura Hutchinson expressed amazement at the “beautiful show” while sharing three images.
Multiple National Weather Service (NWS) X accounts shared images of the auroras spotted in areas including New York, Pennsylvania and Florida, with the NWS Tallahassee account reminding followers that “a camera may be needed to see the aurora depending on your location.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center predicted that the northern lights would be “as far south as Alabama, to Northern California” when issuing a “severe” G4 geomagnetic storm forecast on Wednesday.
Newsweek reached out for comment to the Space Weather Prediction Center via email on Thursday night.
Both the aurora borealis and aurora australis, or southern lights, are “the result of electrons colliding with the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere,” according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.
“Accelerated electrons follow the magnetic field of Earth down to the Polar Regions where they collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms and molecules in Earth’s upper atmosphere,” the center’s website states. “In these collisions, the electrons transfer their energy to the atmosphere thus exciting the atoms and molecules to higher energy states.”
“When they relax back down to lower energy states, they release their energy in the form of light,” it continues. “This is similar to how a neon light works. The aurora typically forms [31 to 310 miles] above Earth’s surface.”
Different colors of light are visible depending on altitude. Oxygen creates green light at lower altitudes and red light at higher altitudes, while nitrogen creates purple-blue light. Northern lights that are spotted in southern areas largely appear red because observers can only see the high-altitude lights.
In addition to the visual spectacle of auroras, strong geomagnetic storms can also present risks to power infrastructure and communication networks—a key concern this week in the U.S. as several states recover from destruction brought by Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.
Peter Gallagher, head of astronomy and astrophysics and director of the Dunsink Observatory at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, previously told Newsweek that the solar storm could interfere with “communication networks being used by emergency responders.”
There were no reports of the geomagnetic storm causing any major disruptions to communications networks at the time of publication.
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