At the moment, flares are increasing on the Sun. This gives rise to the Northern Lights visible even in Switzerland.
Sabine Kuster / ch media
During the night from Sunday to Monday, a natural spectacle colored the sky green above Säntis, one of the legendary peaks of the Alps. This is the solar wind, which sends electrons and protons through space to Earth, where they disrupt the magnetosphere and produce green and yellow or red and purple lights.
Northern lights over Säntis during the night from Sunday to Monday.
The particles are deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field and directed towards the poles. There, at around ten kilometers altitude, they come into contact with oxygen, for example, which creates a green light, or purple-red light after contact with nitrogen. A red color indicates that the solar wind is strong: for the particles to interact with nitrogen, more energy is required.
The Northern Lights in Switzerland are a rare event, but they were already observed on November 5 last year. On February 23, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that the largest flare of the current solar cycle had been observed on the Sun. However, it was a flare of light and not a plasma flare, what is known as a coronal mass ejection. These two events are more frequent and more intense during a solar maximumbut only a plasma eruption causes strong aurora borealis.
At the end of March, particularly fast-moving Northern Lights were observed from Europe to New Zealand and the United States. Scientists expect more such events to occur this year and in 2025. Larger events can disrupt navigation systems, satellite transmissions, and radio transmissions, which are now widespread and sensitive. But this only if the eruption occurs on the side of the sun facing Earth. And most of this solar radiation is constantly deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field.
In September 2023 on the Jungfrau.
As solar storms are more frequent in the north, near the poles, the Finnish electricity networks are, for example, particularly well protected – with three-phase transformers, which are not directly brought into contact with the earth and are therefore particularly resistant. In order to be able to better predict solar flares for Switzerland in the future, two astrophysics professors asked the Swiss National Science Foundation to establish a research center for global meteorology.
Translated and adapted by Tanja Maeder
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