Get ready to see more of the Northern Lights

In the Southern Hemisphere, aurora australis or the southern lights are typically visible from Antarctica, Australia and southern Argentina. Their visibility has also increased.

In addition to creating a beautiful show, scientists are interested in the auroras because extreme geomagnetic storms, which can create the lights, can also damage power grids, said Taylor Cameron, a research scientist with the Canadian Hazards Information Service. The last major outage of this kind was in 1989, which left six million people in Quebec without power.

Why are the Northern Lights more common now?

As the sun’s magnetic fields flip in 11 years, this cycle will phase between solar minimum and solar maximum, said Dr. cameron. Experts predict solar maximum will be reached in 2025, meaning the auroral oval, or the area on Earth where the lights are visible, will widen until then.

“When we’re in the minimum part of the solar cycle, the sun is very still. Nothing really happens,” said Dr. cameron. “And then we have a maximum of many solar flares, many corona mass ejections. The sun is just much more active.”

The current cycle started in 2019, he said.

The solar cycle is linked to the sun’s magnetic field, said Dr. Cameron, but does not affect the temperature. (Unlike the sun’s 11-year cycle, the geomagnetic field reverses as often as every 10,000 years and as rarely as every 50 million years or more, according to the United States Geological Survey. The last reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field was about 780,000 years ago.)