A burst of extremely rare pink auroras recently lit up the night sky over Norway after a solar storm hit Earth and punched a hole in the planet’s magnetic field. The breach allowed highly energetic solar particles to penetrate deeper into the atmosphere than normal, triggering unusual colored lights.
The magnificent light show was spotted on November 3 by a tour group led by Markus Varik, a northern Lights tourist guide of Greenlandic travel agency (opens in a new tab) based near Tromsø in Norway. Vibrant auroras emerged around 6 p.m. local time and lasted about 2 minutes, Varik told Live Science in an email.
“These are the strongest pink auroras I’ve seen in over a decade of premier touring,” Varik said. “It was a humbling experience.”
The pink auroras emerged shortly after a small crack appeared in the magnetosphere – an invisible magnetic field around the Earth generated by the fluid metallic core of the planet. Scientists detected the breach after a minor G-1 class solar storm slammed into Earth on Nov. 3, according to Spaceweather.com (opens in a new tab).
Related: Do extraterrestrial auroras occur on other planets?
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Auroras form when streams of highly energetic charged particles, called solar wind, pass around the magnetosphere. The planet’s magnetic field protects us from cosmic radiation, but the shield is naturally weaker at the North and South poles, allowing the solar wind to travel through the atmosphere – typically between 62 and 186 miles (100 and 300 kilometers) above. above the Earth’s surface. As solar particles pass through the atmosphere, they superheat the gases, which then glow vibrantly in the night sky, according to Nasa (opens in a new tab).
Auroras most often appear green because oxygen atoms, which are abundant in the part of the atmosphere that the solar wind normally reaches, emit this hue when excited. However, during the recent solar storm, the crack in Earth’s magnetosphere allowed solar wind to penetrate below 100 km, where nitrogen is the most abundant gas, according to Spaceweather.com. As a result, the auroras emitted a fluorescent pink glow as the supercharged particles shattered mostly into nitrogen atoms.
The crack in Earth’s magnetosphere also helped generate strong green auroras throughout the night, Varik said.
The magnetosphere hole closed about 6 hours after it first opened. Meanwhile, a strange ribbon of blue light also emerged in the sky over Sweden, where it remained motionless in the sky for around 30 minutes, according to Spaceweather.com (opens in a new tab).
However, experts don’t know if this unusual phenomenon was a never-before-seen type of aurora caused by the compromised magnetosphere, or if it was the result of something else. An expert suggested the ribbon could have been frozen fuel from a Russian rocket, but no rockets were spotted in the area, according to Spaceweather.com.
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