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 south of Argentina. Their visibility has also expanded.

Besides 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 large outage of this sort was in 1989, leaving six million people in Quebec without power.

Why are the northern lights more prevalent now?

As the sun’s magnetic fields flip over 11 years, this cycle, phases between solar minimum and solar maximum, Dr. Cameron said. Experts predict that 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 quiet, basically nothing going on,” Dr. Cameron said. “And then at maximum, we’ve got lots of solar flares, lots of coronal mass ejections. The sun is just much more active.”

The current cycle started in 2019, he said.

The solar cycle is tied to the sun’s magnetic field, Dr. Cameron said, but doesn’t affect its temperature. (In contrast to the sun’s 11-year cycle, the earth’s magnetic field reverses as often as every 10,000 years and as infrequently 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.)