The skies across the United Kingdom glowed pink and green last weekend as the Northern Lights put on spectacular spectacles for skygazers.
The spectacle occurred after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States issued its first severe solar storm warning since 2005, as a succession of solar flares combined to generate a massive blast of solar plasma.
“We had a quite enormous sunspot, about 15 times the size of the Earth, on the Earth-facing side of the sun,” said Krista Hammond, a space weather researcher at the Office.
“It was releasing a lot of solar flares and coronal mass ejections which are enormous eruptions of charged particles.”
