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The Northern Lights are common near the Arctic Circle, but the Wasatch Ridge also occasionally catches a glimpse of the lights known as the Aurora Borealis.
Space weather forecaster Shawn Dahl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the northern lights shine when solar materials containing charged particles and strong magnetic fields shoot into space.
It's the type of solar storm called a coronal mass ejection (CME) that lights up the local night sky.
“It's a pretty complicated phenomenon to have all of this happen and all of the things that have to come together for it to be as bright as it was earlier this week,” Dahl said on KPCW's “Local News Hour” Friday, Nov. 14.
He says two such outbursts have reached Earth in recent days and at least one could arrive sometime on Wednesday.
However, Dahl said Utah and much of North America were simply lucky to see the exhibit for three reasons.
First, North America's magnetic field dips further south than Europe or Asia, which Dahl says helps push the lights further toward the equator. Second is timing: the sky was dark because the sun sets earlier and there wasn't much moonlight. The third concerns magnetism.
“If you think about a positive magnet and a positive magnet, they repel each other. If you think about a positive magnet and a negative magnet, they connect,” Dahl said. “Well, this storm has a connection, and it doesn’t always.”
Dahl said on the space weather scale of one to five, the show is a G4, which is very rare. He said there was a point where the lights almost reached G5, which is extremely rare and would have made the light show even more intense.