Northern lights will illuminate the sky Thursday, with another chance to see aurora in northern Minnesota on Friday

MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota saw a beautiful Northern Lights show Thursday night thanks to a geomagnetic storm that will continue Friday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center said a coronal mass ejection (CME) left the sun around 9 p.m. CST on Wednesday, traveling 2.5 million miles per hour to arrive on Earth after 10 a.m. Thursday.

Minnesotans from Linden Hills to Duluth could see the lights, which ranged in color from red to green to purple.

“This is a very fast CME. It’s the fastest CME we’ve actually measured to date that had a total Earth component in the solar cycle,” says space weather forecaster Shawn Dahl.

On Thursday, the storm was rated at a G4, meaning it was severe. The storm is rated G2, or moderate level, on Friday morning. The storm is expected to weaken as the day progresses, but Minnesotans living in the north will still be able to see some of the lights in the evening.

Dahl’s team says the storm “could impact ongoing recovery efforts for Hurricanes Helene and Milton” due to potential disruptions to communications satellites, high-frequency radio signals, GPS systems and power grids already strained by the massive storms.

NOAA has a spacecraft 1 million miles from Earth that alerts the prediction center when solar flares are between 15 and 30 minutes away from reaching our planet. Anyway, Predicting space storms is a pretty unpredictable science.

You can watch the storm’s activity in real time on the forecast center website.

Why do there seem to be more Northern Lights this year?

Bryan Brasher, the forecast center’s project manager, says we are at the peak of solar cycle 25, with each cycle lasting about eleven years. He says this cycle has been much more active than predicted.

All that activity has given Minnesotans plenty of opportunities to marvel at dancing light shows in the sky, with the most recent set of auroras visible in the Twin Cities and other parts of the state. this past weekend.

This current storm could even rival that of May produced incredible auroras over Minnesotabut it is unclear whether it will be as strong or last as long.

The prediction center says CMEs are “massive explosions of solar and embedded magnetic fields.” When a CME hits and envelopes our planet’s magnetic field, the collision of its electrically charged particles with our atmosphere can cause blinding waves of color in the sky.

Check this one out tips from the pros about photographing the Northern Lights.