Look for the Northern Lights Thursday night :: WRAL.com

By Tony Rice, NASA Ambassador

The northern horizon of North Carolina and Virginia, west of northern California, is expected to turn green when particles from a solar storm interact with the upper atmosphere. With only a few clouds expected over central North Carolina down to Virginia from Thursday evening to Friday morning, conditions are ideal for sky-watching.

While we don’t see the spectacular ribbons of color you might have seen in the photos, conditions are good for residents as far south as New York City, in Portland Oregon to see auroral activity above .

Solar hatch

Our Sun burps occasionally, in the form of a surface eruption that sends superheated gas with a few billion tons of material into space. A coronal mass ejection (CME) occurs when the looping magnetic field lines of the Sun’s surface, several times larger than the Earth, twist and break.

NASA’s STEREO and Solar Dynamics observatory observed a strong CME earlier this week.

The Earth is protected by a donut-shaped magnetic shield that channels the stress flow of energy and small particles (solar wind) around the planet. The huge bubble of charged energy and particles released by a CME can travel down these magnetic field lines to the hole of this magnetic donut and into the atmosphere.

These particles interact with gases in the upper atmosphere, creating bright displays to the north (Auroral Borealis) and south (Aurora Australis). Oxygen emits green and red light. Nitrogen glows blue and purple.

The stronger the CME, the more these screens are visible to the south. Some are larger and travel faster, at up to 2,000 miles per second. On average, they travel about 300 miles per second, traversing the nearly 93 million miles between the Sun and Earth in about 3.5 days. Not all of these releases are directed to Earth either.

NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center released a geomagnetic storm watch from December 9-11 after STEREO and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spotted the CME expected to bring geomagnetic levels to new heights. minor levels (G1) tonight December 9, increasing to strong (G3) Thursday.