Earlier this week, the Sun unleashed a powerful X-class solar flare, a major burst of electromagnetically charged particles that lit up the Earth’s night sky as they entered our planet’s atmosphere.
The effect was stunning: a dazzling display of auroras reaching as far as southern California. Forecasters told CNN that it was one of the largest solar storms in decades, making for a particularly unique opportunity to watch the show unfold. Our art director spotted the cosmic light show in rural Maine, where he said they were “quite beautiful and vibrant.”
But as one could imagine, the views are even more spectacular above the Earth’s atmosphere from the vantage point of the International Space Station, as demonstrated in a stunning video shared by Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui on X earlier this month. The video shows gorgeous hues blanketing the Earth’s night sky, dancing high above the surface like a diffused, multicolored glow.
Yui was one of the four crew members who were recently medically evacuated from the ISS this week, although it remains unclear which of the astronauts suffered a medical issue.
The JAXA astronaut shared the video four days after NASA first reported a “medical concern with a crew member” and five days before returning to Earth on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft weeks ahead of schedule.
“Knowing that I would soon return, the sun must have tried its best, as I was able to capture a very beautiful aurora,” he wrote in the caption in Japanese. “I was happy to have captured it, but above all, imagining everyone smiling with joy upon seeing the footage, I smiled to myself with a laugh.”
This latest solar storm, which reached what’s known as G4 — or “severe” status, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — caused charged particles released by a coronal mass ejection to collide with the Earth’s magnetosphere.
Auroras, or northern lights, are triggered when these charged particles interact with and ionize the gases in the atmosphere, emitting light in varying colors as a result. While they’re dazzling to look at, all of these particle interactions can wreak havoc with satellites and other human-made objects in the Earth’s orbit.
“We’ve been making all these phone calls to ensure that we are keeping all the critical technological infrastructure operators in the know of what’s happening,” Shawn Dahl, a forecaster at the National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center, told CNN.
As Live Science reports, it was a particularly powerful geomagnetic storm — but not the strongest one on record. A May 2024 storm reached G5, or “extreme,” status, the first to do so since an equally ferocious “Great Halloween solar storm” in 2003.
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