One of nature’s most magnificent shows, the southern lights, is likely to be stronger and more frequent over the next two years as the suns magnetic cycle kicks into overdrive.
Known as the aurora australis, the night-sky light display has captured the attention of onlookers all over southern Australia in recent months, with the fluorescent ribbons of light witnessed as far north as Dubbo in New South Wales and Geraldton in Western Australia.
Matt Woods from the Perth Observatory said the recent burst of bright and far-reaching events, typically only seen by those in Tasmania, was no coincidence.
He said the sun cycle was coming up to solar maximum - the period where solar activity is highest and sunspots are most abundant.
“Solar maximum is when the magnetic field is at its most intense, it’s most disordered and its most dynamic,” he said.
“So the sun is going to get a lot more active.
“It could be teasing us, it could just die in its activity, but the way it’s tracking there is going to be a lot more activity over the next two years.”
The sun rotates through a full cycle approximately every 11 years, with NASA predicting it to reach its peak in July 2025.
“Originally they thought it would be slightly below average, but it’s really starting to peak so it might be a good one considering the 2012-14 peak was very disappointing,” Mr Woods said.
When witnessing the glowing curtains of green, red and pink what you’re seeing is the atoms and molecules in the atmosphere colliding with particles blasted out from the sun.
Mr Woods described it as the same process as a neon sign.
“The radiation from the sun is coming into our atmosphere and interacting and exciting the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in our atmosphere,” he said.
“That’s causing them to glow.
“So the reds and greens are oxygen and the blues and pinks and purples are nitrogen in our atmosphere glowing.”
Generally, the more sunspot activity there is the higher the chances of an aurora occurring.
Tasmania tends to get the most aurora events in Australia.
But Mr Woods said when they were strong enough you could see them hundreds of kilometres further north.
“So for a normal aurora event you can really only see it in Antarctica,” he said.
“If you start to get a solar storm that’s when you get Tasmania and New Zealand’s South Island.
“Medium storms is when you get Albany, Esperance, [the south coast] of South Australia and Victoria come into play .
“And when you get medium to large storms, that’s when you get to see them as far north as Perth.”
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