Northern Lights May Be Seen In Iowa Wednesday, Thursday

A solar flare earlier this week could produce one of nature’s most spectacular shows — the Northern Lights — over the northern United States Wednesday night and into Thursday morning. Auroras could be seen from Washington state to New England, but as far south as Iowa, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana, according to a map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

The lights are courtesy of what’s called a “coronal mass ejection” that occurred Monday. The sun, which is made up of hellishly hot charged particles called plasma roiled by a powerful magnetic field, does this all the time. It’s when plasma enters the Earth’s atmosphere that green, purple, yellow and red auroras dance across the sky.

Two more powerful solar flares on Wednesday morning — one of them the most powerful in more than a decade — could create an outstanding display. But there’s some bad news, too.

If aimed toward Earth, the solar mass ejection, or CME, “could also damage satellites, communications and power systems,” according to space.com.

The first of the two solar flares at 5:10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time Wednesday was the strongest since 2015, but was dwarfed by one that occurred three hours later, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center. The last one of that magnitude was in 2006.

The solar flares caused radio blackouts, according the the Space Weather Prediction Center, including to high-frequency radio, which experienced a “wide area of blackouts, loss of contact for up to an hour over [the] sunlit side of the earth.” Low-frequency communication, which is used in navigation systems, “was degraded for an hour.”

It won’t happen with these solar flares, but the brightly colored auroras have been seen as far south as Cuba and Hawaii, as happened with “The Carrington Event of 1859,” the largest documented solar storm in the last 500 years. The storm shorted out telegraph wires in the United States in Europe, shocking some telegraph operators and sparking fires when discharges from the lines ignited telegraph paper, according to NASA.

To check on Northern Lights in your area, see if your state is along the yellow line or above on the Space Weather Prediction Center.

Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images News/Getty Images