I live in Upstate NY, I can recall maybe once or twice in my entire lifetime hearing about being able to see the aurora and now it seems to be happening at least every few months, lately..
This seems like a significant increase over a very short period of time.. why is this happening?
In: Planetary Science
Aurorae are caused by the solar wind — charged particles that are constantly emitted from the sun — slamming into the Earth’s magnetic field and being funnelled towards its magnetic poles. They interact with the atmosphere, causing aurorae in a big circle around the poles. The solar wind runs on a cycle with a period of roughly eleven years. Right now, we’re at “solar maximum”, so the peak of the cycle, and it’s a particularly, unexpectedly, strong one.
The result is that there are more aurorae. Since the magnetic north is tilted down towards North America from true north, the aurorea extend significantly further south through Canada and into the States than in Europe, where they skew much further north. As a consequence, you’ve always been more likely to see aurorae from New York State than an equal latitude in Europe — and since we’re at a particularly strong solar maximum, you’re more likely to see them now than in decades. Depending on how old you are, more than in your life.
The other thing that’s happening is that this is the first large solar maximum since social media really got big, so we see vastly more photos of it, and read vastly more posts about it, and since the media drives so many stories by scraping Twitter and Reddit for stories, the media is able to report more about the aurorae than it has at previous maxima.
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