MAINE, USA — The aurora borealis graced northern skies once again Thursday night, and Mainers couldn't get enough of the rare sight.
"I looked up in the sky, and it was like red and green," local Malcom Thompson said. "It looked like some kind of rainbow explosion."
The lights form when charged particles from the sun collide with the earth's atmosphere, causing gases like oxygen and nitrogen to emit colorful light.
"Aurora are exceptionally beautiful but sort of illusive, if you will, these northern lights that light up our sky. And they’re coming in, of course, because of charged particles released from the sun that travel on the solar wind and impact earth’s magnetic field and light up in our atmosphere," Shawn Laatsch, the director of the Versant Power Astronomy Center at the University of Maine, said.
He said Maine’s northern lights are due to a huge outburst of solar activity.
"When we do get these big flares, they can make those northern lights visible even farther south, and so basically our entire state was in an aurora oval last night," Laatsch said.
The farther north you go, the better chance you have of seeing the northern lights. But this time, they could be seen much farther south, even in parts of Texas.
"Normally, of course, you have to be very far north to see these, so places like Iceland, Sweden, northern Canada get them quite often. But for it to come this far, of course, we need a really significant amount of solar particles that have traveled and are impacting our atmosphere," Laatsch said.
And Mainers may have another chance to witness the northern lights again Friday night.
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