Stunning aurora australis lights up sky above New Zealand and Australia after ‘cannibal’ solar storm
The geomagnetic storm, caused by powerful bursts of energy from the sun, also postponed the launch of two Mars-bound Nasa spacecraft in the US
Skywatchers enjoyed a stunning treat on Wednesday night, with the southern lights visible across large parts of Australia and New Zealand.
The aurora australis that lit up the sky resulted from what has been dubbed a “cannibal” solar storm.
On social media, aurora viewers shared images from across the country, as far north as Port Macquarie in New South Wales.
Over Australia, the storm – caused by powerful bursts of energy from the sun – reached “G4 geomagnetic storm conditions” on Wednesday, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s space weather forecasting centre.
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In the UK, local activity reached a G5 rating in the early hours of Wednesday morning UK time, according to the British Geological Survey (BGS) – the maximum on the geomagnetic storm scale.
Dr Laura Driessen from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy said there was “a really strong and magnetically active sunspot on the sun at the moment”.
Since 9 November, the sun has released two strong coronal mass ejections – bursts of high-energy plasma – towards Earth.
“They happened at two different times on the ninth and the 10th,” Driessen said. “Basically, the one on the 10th was a bit faster, so it caught up with the one on the ninth.”
The BGS told CNN: “The second one caught up with the first one and they amalgamated together by the time they reached Earth. Hence, the term ‘cannibalised’, as the second one gobbled up the first one.”
The double hit of the cannibal solar storm has resulted in the largest induced geoelectric field to be recorded in the UK since BGS records began in 2012.
According to the BGS, an electric field in the Earth’s surface can result from solar storms, and produce electrical currents with the potential to damage transformers in the power grid.
In the US, it also postponed the launch of two Mars-bound Nasa spacecraft. Blue Origin, the space tech company behind the mission’s launch vehicle, said in a post on X: “Due to highly elevated solar activity and its potential effects on the ESCAPADE spacecraft, NASA is postponing launch until space weather conditions improve.”
Displays of the northern lights, also known as aurora borealis, were also visible in the northern hemisphere.
Auroras result from disturbances to the Earth’s magnetic field, known as the magnetosphere.
“You’re seeing charged particles that are falling on to the Earth’s magnetic field and essentially being tunnelled down some of our magnetic field lines and interacting with the gases and the dust that we have in our atmosphere,” Dr Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University, said.