Northern Lights: On Wednesday night, the sky over parts of the United States turned bright with the same green‑pale ribbons that people usually see over Alaska and Canada. A solar storm sparked a wave of auroras that faded almost like a giant paintbrush across farms in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Kansas and Iowa, and the images spread quickly across social‑media feeds.
The burst began when the Sun sent out a coronal‑mass ejection, a huge shower of charged particles that slammed into the Earth’s magnetic field. The particles slammed into the atmosphere and created a glowing, shimmering display that scientists say could be seen as far south as Texas and as far north as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
In the Midwest, residents of small towns carried their phones up to the big sky. One teenager in Le Sueur, Minnesota, filmed the green curtain of light that rolled over a simple farm at sunset. Across the region, images of the lights arriving over New Hampshire’s dunes and Kansas’ open plains sparked a wave of posts that gathered more than 40,000 likes in hours.
Scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had warned ahead of time that a strong solar flare would hit the earth on that night, while the American Geophysical Union’s Space Weather Prediction Center said the event would be “mildly to moderately intense.” The predictions had many people packing blankets and coffee to watch their first display of the night sky in northern latitudes.
This isn’t the first time the U.S. has had the aurora reach so far south, but the 2025 flare was a little more dramatic. The last time a bright, all‑over display like this happened was in 2019, when the light dotted the skies over Washington and eastern Canada. Though it’s rare for the Northern Lights to appear in states that lie at lower latitudes, the heavy solar storm made the phenomenon visible to a wide swath of the country.
“It’s still a stretch to call it the aurora borealis,” said Dr. Maya Patel, a solar‑physics professor at the University of Colorado. “But this event had enough energy to push the auroral oval south, so people were able to see the dramatic green and faint pink blooms that cities in the U.S. don’t normally get to enjoy without heading out west.”
For those who missed the chance to watch the lights in person, NASA’s Virtual Aurora app and the Solar Weather App from the NOAA provide a record of the event and tools to study how the particles traveled through the Earth’s magnetosphere. Users can also find archived footage on the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory site, which offers a close‑up view of the Sun’s activity that triggered the streaky lights.
In a few weeks, the sky will clear up again and the auroras will drift back toward the polar regions. If you live south of the Great Lakes, keep an eye on the weather feed—weather apps now warn for tomorrow’s night that a residual solar dust might still light up the sky in the west, though it will be a dimmer show.
As the display faded at dawn, people across the nation were left with a sense that the sky had briefly opened up. The event is a reminder that the space weather around Earth is always changing and that sometimes, an unexpected burst from the Sun can bring a little extra sparkle to the night.
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