The Northern Lights were visible throughout Italy: check out the exceptional photos also from Sicily
A show never seen before: the Northern Lights appeared tonight with the naked eye practically throughout Italy. The photos
An unparalleled spectacle, a very serious geomagnetic storm caused the phenomenon of the Northern Lights at very low latitudes. The auroral manifestation was visible to the naked eye practically everywhere . As you read the article you will find images taken everywhere. We asked the opinion of INAF’s solar astrophysicist. Here are his words:
“With a low of -335 nT Dst reached tonight at 03:00, this storm is now the second strongest of solar cycle 25.
A few minutes ago we entered another wave with G4 geomagnetic storm conditions and photos are arriving from the United States and Canada and I saw one from Cuba. After 8 hours inside the CME due to the X1.8 flare of the October 8, we expect it to pass Earth in a few hours.“
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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.
