A powerful electromagnetic storm brought the Northern Lights to many states across the country Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, including Nevada.
Nevada residents may have noticed green or purple glows near the northern horizon, especially in rural areas.
The best viewing times were typically between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., when geomagnetic activity peaked.
The storms happen when the solar wind, caused by solar flares, rushes through the Earth's magnetic field, causing charged particles to interact with gases in the atmosphere.
This causes the Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis, to ripple across the sky.
According to Barrett Lee, local astronomer and physicist, "The nitrogen is usually the blue and the purple kind of end of it, but oxygen produces the green and the red. It just kind of depends more on the altitude that excitement is happening at, and we actually have it through the NOAA. We actually have an aurora prediction, and they give a forecast for this kind of thing."
A solar flare is also known asl a coronal mass ejection and is essentially a blob of plasma from the sun.
When this material is ejected toward the Earth and interacts with the gases in our atmosphere, the resulting energy lights up the skies.
