On Friday night, people from across the world were treated to a rare spectacle: vivid aurorae hanging like curtains of light in the sky. They appeared even in places where aurorae aren’t usually visible. For instance, people at the Indian Astronomical Observatory spotted an aurora over Hanle in Ladakh — far away from places near the poles, where they are a more common sight.
“I haven’t seen anything like this in the last 20 years,” says Dibyendu Nandi, a space physicist at the Indian Institute of Scientific Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata.
Beautiful though the aurorae are, the events on the Sun that produce them can trigger blackouts on the earth, knock out satellites in space, endanger the lives of astronauts, and affect space weather throughout the Solar System. Studying, understanding, and, in future, predicting them is thus a key goal of solar physics research.
