Powerful solar storm pierces Earth's atmosphere and sparks rare pink northern lights

On November 3, a solar storm caused a temporary crack in the Earth's magnetic field. The resulting hole allowed energetic particles to penetrate deep into the planet's atmosphere and cause an extremely rare pink aurora. LiveScience.

Photo: IStock

The appearance of an extremely rare pink aurora recently lit up the night sky over Norway after a solar storm hit Earth and blew a hole in the planet's magnetic field. The breach allowed high-energy solar particles to penetrate deeper than usual into the atmosphere, causing unusual colored lights.

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The stunning light show was spotted on November 3rd by a tour group led by Markus Varik, a northern lights guide from Greenlander travel company based near Tromsø in Norway. The bright aurora appeared around 18:00. local time and lasted about 2 minutes.

“It was the strongest pink aurora I’ve seen in more than a decade of guiding,” Varick said. “It was an amazing experience.”

The pink aurora appeared shortly after a small crack appeared in the magnetosphere - an invisible magnetic field that surrounds the Earth, which is generated by the liquid metal core of the planet. According to Spaceweather.com, scientists discovered the breach after a small G-3 class solar storm hit Earth on November 1.

Auroras are formed when streams of high-energy charged particles known as the solar wind pass around the magnetosphere. The planet's magnetic field shields us from cosmic radiation, but the shield is naturally weaker at the North and South Poles, allowing the solar wind to skim through the atmosphere - typically 100 to 300 kilometers above the Earth's surface. As solar particles pass through the atmosphere, they superheat the gases, which then glow brightly in the night sky, according to NASA.

Auroras most often appear green because oxygen atoms, which are plentiful in the part of the atmosphere where the solar wind normally reaches, emit this hue. However, during a recent solar storm, a crack in Earth's magnetosphere allowed the solar wind to penetrate below 100 km, where nitrogen is the most abundant gas, according to Spaceweather.com. As a result, the aurora emitted a neon pink glow as the supercharged particles crashed into mostly nitrogen atoms.

A crack in Earth's magnetosphere also contributed to the strong green aurora during the night, Varik said.

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The hole in the magnetosphere closed about 6 hours after it first opened. A strange streak of blue light also appeared in the skies over Sweden at this time, according to Spaceweather.com, where it hung motionless for about 30 minutes.

However, experts aren't sure if this unusual phenomenon was some previously unseen type of aurora caused by the magnetosphere breaking apart, or if it was the result of something else. One expert speculated that the ribbon could have been frozen Russian rocket fuel, but no rockets were seen in the area, according to Spaceweather.com.

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