The green, blue and pink hues of auroras will likely be visible to more skywatchers in the United States over the next year, as the sun reaches its highest rate of solar activity, astrophysicists told Newsweek.
The 'solar maximum' refers to the sun's highest rate of activity during its roughly 11-year solar cycle, during which there is more chance of spotting the vivid, nighttime light displays.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) said that solar activity will peak between late 2024 and early 2026.
Robert Massey, deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society in the U.K., told Newsweek: "The solar cycle is the change in activity on the sun over 11 years, seen as an increase in the number of sunspots. The peak for this cycle is predicted to be either this year or next year.
"Enhanced auroral displays result from high solar activity, when so-called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) send clouds of electrically charged particles toward the Earth," Massey added.
"If these reach the Earth, as some CMEs go in entirely different directions, the result is interference with the Earth's magnetic field. That in turn funnels fast-moving particles into our upper atmosphere, colliding with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen and, as these de-excite, they emit light of different colors; these are aurorae."
A green aurora is triggered when the solar particles come into contact with oxygen, while blue or purple hues are caused by nitrogen.
In May, the northern lights were visible from almost every state in the U.S., including as far south as Florida. They were also seen across the U.K., Germany and Italy, and even northern India.
"This was a result of an unusually large sunspot group that grew to be about 15 times the size of the Earth, and a large associated ejection of material," said Massey.
The northern lights are seen most often in regions close to the North Pole such as Scandinavia, according to the British Geological Survey (BGS). However, stronger solar activity, such as extreme solar storms, can make the light spectacle visible much further south.
In a statement, Simon Machin, the U.K.'s Met Office space weather manager, said: "We know that the solar maximum increases the chances of space weather events impacting the Earth, but even as you move away from 2024 into 2025 and beyond, the sun will continue to emit solar flares and geomagnetic storms."
Machin added: "This means that further auroral displays are likely, as well as an ongoing chance of potentially impactful space weather events, even as we move toward the next solar minimum."
This week, the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SPWC) issued a G1 geomagnetic storm watch for June 4 in anticipation of a coronal mass-ejection event. Geomagnetic storms are ranked on a scale from G1 (minor) to G5 (extreme). However, even a G1 storm can lead to the northern lights being seen as far south as Michigan and Maine.
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