Astronomy Northern lights light up Germany’s night sky
dpa May 12, 2024 – 3:10 p.m
Play of colors: Northern lights in the sky over Bersenbrück in Lower Saxony. Photo: Markus Hibbeler/dpa
Northern lights created a colorful spectacle in the night sky over Germany over the weekend. This was triggered by an extremely strong solar storm.
Göttingen/Offenbach – Over the weekend, people in many regions of Germany had the rare opportunity to marvel at colorful northern lights in the sky. A massive solar storm ensured that the natural phenomenon could be seen from Schleswig-Holstein to Bavaria on Saturday night and partly also the following night.
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From the pink Alps to purple wind turbines in Brandenburg to the dramatically illuminated Brocken in the Harz Mountains – the Northern Lights offered an impressive spectacle, as shown by numerous photos on social networks. The celestial spectacle was particularly impressive from Friday to Saturday. The following night it was already necessary to be in a very dark place or use a camera to spot the colorful lights.
Auroras occur when coronal mass ejections (CME) or solar storms impact the Earth’s magnetic field. There they do not directly produce the northern lights, but rather compress our planet’s magnetic field “like a drop,” explains astronomer Volker Bothmer from the University of Göttingen. To put it simply, the particles then collide with components of the Earth’s atmosphere, causing them to glow.
First of all, no more Northern Lights to observe
According to Bothmer, there are currently many sunspots: an expression of an eleven-year cycle, the maximum of which will last for another two years and during which there are always phases in which the sun pulsates. “Since the middle of last week we have had a region that consists of several spots and a lot of energy has been released,” Bothmer told the German Press Agency.
Extreme storms would not only depend on the sun, but on several factors: These include, among other things, the direction in which the storms move, how the earth passes through the plasma cloud emanating from the sun and what time of year it is.
Both the US weather agency NOAA and the European Space Agency (ESA) expect solar activity to remain at a high level until Monday. However, astronomer Bothmer estimates the likelihood of further northern lights over Germany to be low: “I don’t see anything on our satellite data at the moment. And if a spur comes, it shouldn’t be that strong because the active region on the sun has rotated out of the line of fire .”
According to the German Weather Service (DWD), the conditions for observing the phenomenon in parts of Germany are not ideal anyway: In the far west and southwest, dense clouds will gather on Monday night. In the rest of the country, however, the DWD expects a slightly cloudy to clear night.