Start into the new year
Northern lights over Germany – that’s what you should know
January 2, 2025 – 9:40 a.mReading time: 2 min.
Northern lights could be seen over large parts of Germany on the first day of the new year. The celestial phenomenon could last for the rest of the year.
Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Lower Saxony: In many parts of the country the sky shone in bright colors on the first evening of the year. The American atmospheric service NOAA reported a geomagnetic storm of the second highest level G4 for New Year’s Day. Because solar activity is still at its peak, astronomers expect more northern lights in 2025.
The light show in the sky is triggered by high-energy solar wind particles when they are thrown into space at high speeds during eruptions on the sun’s surface and then hit the Earth’s magnetic field. In the past few months there have been repeated sightings of the northern lights in Germany.
What was noticeable: Sometimes the northern lights didn’t shimmer green, but rather red. Where does that come from? Rainer Kresken is an engineer at the Esa space agency and head of the Starkenburg Observatory in Heppenheim. In an interview with t-online, he said: “Green northern lights are usually generated by oxygen at an altitude of 80 to 150 kilometers.”
At an altitude between 150 and 600 kilometers, nitrogen atoms would produce red or blue colors. “Since we in Germany are quite far away from the polar regions, we can only see the northern lights in the higher layers of the atmosphere,” says Kresken.
Eruptions on the sun not only cause the northern lights, but can also have dangerous effects on the earth’s infrastructure – for example on the Internet and electricity. In February 2022, 38 Starlink satellites crashed as a result of a solar storm, and in March 1989 a solar flare caused a large-scale power outage in Canada.
During the Carrington Event in 1859, the strongest solar eruption ever observed, the newly installed telegraph network in North America and Northern Europe collapsed. During such an eruption – also called a superflare – the sun can emit ten to hundred thousand times more energy than in the Carrington event.