The coronal mass ejection that flew by Earth at some 900 miles per second produced a minor geomagnetic storm, which in-turn produced some particularly lovely northern lights.
The U.S. Department of the Interior just tweeted a stunning photo of the northern lights from Delani National Park in Alaska, saying it is "One of the best photos of the #Northern Lights we have seen over @DenaliNPS."
The folks over at Denali National Park, home of Mt. McKinley, the tallest peak in North America, have been tweeting wild pictures of the northern lights ever since the coronal mass ejection passed by Earth.
On Friday, March 15 a solar phenomenon known as a coronal mass ejection erupted from the sun, sending billions of tons of solar particles into space in the direction of Earth. The high-speed coronal mass ejection sent particles blazing towards Earth at speeds of 900 miles per second, or about 3.2 million miles per hour.
Whenever the sun ejects solar particles towards Earth, the particles get funneled to the Earth's poles by the planet's magnetic field. When the particles interact with the Earth's atmosphere in the northern hemisphere, the sky often glows, a phenomenon known as northern lights, or aurora borealis.
The energy created when the solar particles strike the atmosphere excites the atoms and causes them to glow colors like green, blue or red, depending on the gases they emit.
When this happens in the southern hemisphere it's called aurora australis.
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