All of Italy, really all of it, surprised, amazed, with eyes turned north, admiring a spectacle that is rarely seen in the northern skies of the Peninsula, let alone in Sorrento, Calabria or Sicily. The Northern Lights on the night between 10 and 11 May were something historic, due to their extension and intensity. And it might not end there. What they call “northern lights” this time took over half the hemisphere. They painted the white snows of the Alps pink, from Val d’Aosta to Cortina up to Friuli, immortalized by webcams on the peaks. The amazement spread on social media, an enthusiastic word of mouth fueled by scientists and popularizers who invited people to go out and stop in front of the Cosmos which for once was knocking on the doors of our sky.
The amazement on social media
Twitter and Facebook were invaded by surprised, even emotional comments that accompanied the photos of strokes of light over Turin and the Superga hill. Alessandro Marchini, director of the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Siena, captured the glow that stood out on the Torre del Mangia. He was even able to perceive its shapes in skies plagued by light pollution such as that of Rome or the Romagna coast.
And then even further down, in Puglia, ever lower on the horizon, it enchanted Ostuni and Matera. Nello Ruocco, from the Inaf Observatory in Sorrento, published his shots of her exclaiming “And who would have thought it!”. They would never have said it in Calabria and Sicily, yet, lens in hand, even if it was only a cell phone, the images posted by Coccorino and Patti prove it. Italy like the rest of the world, millions of people united by the same unexpected joy.
From Canada to the Gulf of Mexico
If in Canada and Alaska certain visions are almost ordinary, this is certainly not the case in the Gulf of Mexico. Sightings have been recorded and shared from Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. There were those who even cheered from the northernmost regions of India. The “southern lights”, at the other extreme, lit up the sky of Christchurch, New Zealand. It was an expected event, but not of this magnitude. NOAA, the US agency that also monitors space weather, had warned: a major geomagnetic storm is on the way. Numerous solar flares have been unleashed in the previous two days and are headed towards Earth. However, the forecasts turned out to be underestimated: from G4 they reached G5, the maximum.
Meanwhile, new phenomena of the greatest power have continued to hit us, as the plasma bubbles erupted from the Sun have, one after the other, reached the Earth, like the breakers of a stormy ocean. “It’s a weekend that will go down in history – He explains Daria Guidetti, INAF researcher and head of the Space Surveillance program – it was an extreme storm, the last one occurred in 2003. It comes from a region that will not set tomorrow and which will remain on the solar disk for another five days. More could come. If in doubt, especially tonight, I would give it a look at the sky.”
The show goes on
The show was offered by a group of sunspots which, together, measure 16-17 times the diameter of the Earth, visible even to the naked eye, with adequate protection. A very active region from which violent flares continue to ignite. We are approaching the maximum activity of our star, expected by the end of 2024, in a cycle that lasts about 11 years: “In my opinion it will be fun – concludes the astrophysicist – the maximum will arrive this year, but it is not arrived yet. It is already holding surprises and even if no predictions are made, I think it will be fun.”
Attention remains high because space weather still struggles to provide detailed forecasts and the Sun can also do a lot of damage. The most powerful geomagnetic storms can cause damage to satellites and astronauts in orbit (NASA said that there were no problems for the crews on board the International Space Station), to aircraft along polar routes and even to power plants in Earth. No major faults reported at this time. The last major event, the October 2003 Halloween storms, caused blackouts in Norway and even South Africa.
