People visit St Mary’s lighthouse in Whitley Bay to see the aurora borealis last weekend (Picture: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)
Scientists have confirmed Brits will be able to see the Northern Lights again in as soon as two weeks.
The sunspot cluster, which hurled energy and gas towards the Earth, will rotate back to us in a fortnight.
If the cluster is large and complex enough, it will generate more explosions which creates the aurora borealis as it hits the Earth’s magnetic field.
The sun is approaching its ‘solar maximum’, which it reaches once every 11 years and is when activity is strongest.
The intensity of each cycle is estimated by the number of sunspots, but it doesn’t tell us how strong the storms will be when they reach Earth, Krista Hammond, a space weather forecaster at the Met Office said.
The geomagnetic storm last weekend was the first time in 20 years that displays of the aurora borealis could be seen across the UK so clearly, even visible over London’s light pollution.
Professor Jim Wild, space physicist from the University of Lancaster, said whether we will see the lights again ‘all depends on the sun’.
‘Those amazing displays on last weekend were triggered by solar activity that launched material from the Sun last Wednesday, and it took a couple of days to cross space and get to us,’ he said.
Can the northern lights cause disruption too?
The general public may be most excited by the pretty photos, but governments are more likely to be concerned about effects on infrastructure when a massive solar storm erupts.
While this weekend’s was the biggest for 20 years, it’s by no means the biggest we know about.
That was the ‘Carrington Event’ in 1859, the most intense geomagnetic storm on record, which was about three or four times larger than this one.
It caused disruption even without society being reliant on electricity, and if something on that level happened now it would interfere with satellite and radio communications, and could introduce electrical currents into power grids, railway lines and pipelines and interfere with those operations.
Systems seem to have emerged pretty much unscathed but the need to build resilience is something industries will have been thinking about, Prof Wild said.
Aurora illuminates skies over Lancashire (Picture: Dave Kay/SWNS)
Aurora seen from The Rayleigh Observatory, Harrow (Picture: Dr Chris Crowe/SWNS)
‘Over the weekend, a couple more of these clouds of material arrived from the Sun – not quite so big or so powerful, but they did trigger some more display.
‘At the moment that activity is subsiding, but we know there are potentially some more of these clouds of material on the way, and the Sun could emit more again because it is especially active at the moment.
‘So I wouldn’t say no, there’s no chance, but I think Friday and Saturday were the main events.
‘We’re gliding down in activity and we’d need something to re-energize the system if we were to see those kind of displays again.’
It is hard to predict the exact activity of the Sun, but the good news is that any major solar flares will not cause the aurora to begin immediately, but give a day or two notice.
‘If the sun does something powerful today then that could be with us within 24 to 36 hours,’ Prof Wild said.
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