The Northern Lights are visible in northern Italy, it is possible to see them even at low latitudes
If you are at home watching TV this is the right time to get up and go hunting for the Northern Lights. The natural phenomenon is making its way across the peaks of northern Italy and will continue to intensify in the next few hours, increasing the chances of being able to observe it even at low latitudes as happened last May. Here are some photos that came to us from Bolzano:
Alessandro Zanforlin from Bolzano
The image below came to us from Vieste in Puglia!
How the Northern Lights phenomenon is created
The aurora, called aurora borealis or australis depending on whether it occurs in the northern or southern hemisphere of the Earth respectively, is an optical phenomenon of the Earth’s atmosphere. Although auroras are seen at night, they are actually caused by the . Our star sends us something else beyond heat and light: it ‘shoots’ the solar wind at us, a flow of electrically charged particles which, when they encounter the Earth’s magnetic field, interact with it. The denser and more intense the solar wind flow is, the more conspicuous the interaction will be, with a passage of energy entering the atmosphere and exciting the oxygen and nitrogen atoms, the constituent gases of the Earth’s atmosphere. This excitation of atmospheric gases causes the play of green, red and blue lights that we call aurora.
The red color of the aurora in Italy (and not green)
As we explained in a previous article, the Northern Lights form after solar particles interact with oxygen atoms trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. The green color we generally see is due to the (low) altitude. Generally, in fact, they are spotted between 100 and 300 km above our heads. But when solar activity is particularly intense, particles coming from the Sun can interact with molecular oxygen even higher up, between 400 and 800 km. This causes the red color that we also saw in Italy last May.
