It was a celestial show in the heavens that many Americans thought they would never witness firsthand.
Millions across the country were treated to a green and purple glow in the sky this past weekend as far south as Texas in the U.S., as well as Chile, northern China, England, and northern Europe.
It was all thanks to a severe geomagnetic storm on the surface of the sun that produced a rare and powerful sequence of solar flares over several days.Â
Robert Steenburgh, a space scientist at NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center said, “The flares haven’t been particularly strong, but the fact that we had a sequence, a rapid-fire of all these CME’s, coronal mass ejections, aimed at Earth and arriving at Earth is what drove the geomagnetic field to such an agitated state.”
Ian Cohen at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory added, “Basically what happens is part of the sun actually lifts off the surface. So, this plasma, the charged particles, the magnetic field that makes up the sun part of it actually lifts off the sun and streams away into space.”
The light show also caused some minor problems with the power grid, high-frequency communications, and some GPS systems, causing
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