Northern Lights set to light up the skies over Britain once more tonight – this is the place | UK | News | EUROtoday

Parts of Britain might take pleasure in one other celestial present this night, with the Northern Lights seen as soon as once more.

The nation loved spectacular views of the Aurora Borealis final weekend, with stunning shows seen in Essex, Cambridgeshire and Berkshire.

Sky-gazers additionally reported seeing them in Kent, Suffolk and Hampshire.

Meanwhile Ireland’s climate service Met Eireann shared footage of the lights in each Dublin and County Clare’s Shannon Airport.

Now, components of northern Britain have been advised to maintain their eyes peeled for a second instalment with a pink alert issued, which signifies the aurora could possibly be seen with the bare eye anyplace within the UK.

AuroraWatch UK, run by scientists within the Space and Planetary Physics group at Lancaster University’s Department of Physics, mentioned: “Aurora is likely to be visible by eye from Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland; possibly visible from elsewhere in the UK.

“Photographs of aurora are doubtless from anyplace within the UK.”

The Met Office’s space weather department says “enhancement to the aurora is probably going into early May 18 within the Northern Hemisphere.

“The aurora may become visible as far south as parts of Scotland where skies are clear.

“Mainly background aurora situations are anticipated thereafter.”

Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are large expulsions of plasma from the sun.

The Northern Lights have been more visible as a result of an “excessive” geomagnetic storm, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has explained.

The NOAA said the G5 geomagnetic storm, the strongest level, reached Earth on Thursday.

It was caused by a “massive, complicated” sunspot cluster 17 occasions the diameter of the Earth.

The final storm with a G5 score hit in October 2003, inflicting energy outages in Sweden.

Speaking to Express.co.uk in 2019, Mike Willis, head of area security with the UK Space Agency, mentioned Britain must be ready for the widespread disruption a photo voltaic storm comparable with the so-called Carrington occasion of 1859 would deliver.

He defined: “What we are concerned about is the extreme events which would be much more than your normal flare. “This could actually cause serious disruption if we don’t forecast it and if we don’t do anything about it.

“There was a report published a couple of years ago now which looked at a worst-case, once-in-100 year event and concluded that the cost would be, which concluded that the cost would be £5billion over five days, so that’s the sort of losses.”

He added: “It’s things like logistics, it’s things like people not being able to navigate, things like timing systems, emergency services.

“There’s also the power grids – one of the impacts of space weather is to create geomagnetic activity which induces currents in long flexible conductors, and these are direct currents.”