Magnetic energy had been building up in the sun this week like a rubber band twisted into a corkscrew. On Thursday morning, the rubber band snapped, and the pent-up energy was released as a solar flare, ejecting about a billion tons of plasma gas that could result in the dazzling display known as the northern lights once it reaches Earth this weekend. “If I was in the northern tier of the United States, then I would take a look in the sky,” Howard J. Singer, chief scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center at the National Weather Service, said in an interview on Saturday. The prediction center issued a geomagnetic storm watch on Friday that said the storm may drive the aurora borealis, the scientific name for the northern lights, over Washington State, the upper Midwest and the Northeast on Saturday.

Source: The North Africa Journal October 31, 2021 10:38 UTC