Going green: Native look for Northern Lights on Paddy’s Day

One of the world’s largest astronomical meetings is hearing on Tuesday about a St Patrick’s Day fireworks display created by two massive eruptions on the surface of the sun.

The solar storm triggered a display of the Northern Lights seen over much of Ireland and Britain.

The storm's approach was detected by a warning system developed by Trinity College Dublin and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

This system notified Prof Peter Gallagher there was an incoming solar storm even as he watched the St Patrick's Day parade with his family, the head of solar physics and space weather at Trinity said.

“That evening the sky danced red, pink and notably green across Ireland and the UK,” he said.

Prof Gallagher and Dr Gemma Kelly of the British Geological Survey will present their research on the effects of the March 17th storm at the Royal Astronomical Society’s annual National Astronomy Meeting taking place this week in Llandudno, Wales, an event that has attracted 500 astronomers.

“This storm and a more recent one in June were the biggest we have seen in over 10 years,” Kelly said.

Energy-charged particles

The lights, or Aurora Borealis, are caused when eruptions on the sun’s surface cause a release of energy-charged particles that flow into space as the solar wind.

If they happen to be released towards the Earth, its magnetic field interacts with the particles and some of them pour into the polar regions and crash into the upper atmosphere, causing the northern lights.

They put on a spectacular display, but Gallagher and Kelly were just as interested in what might be happening to our communications and electrical power systems at the time.

The particles can induce electric currents to flow and these in turn can knock out essential services, Gallagher said, adding no effects were predicted or later reported.

“They produced the biggest electrical fields on the ground and hence currents we have seen since our system started operation in 2012,” added Kelly.

Yet no damage occurred in Britain or Ireland.

Things were different in 1989 in Canada when a solar storm knocked out power for more than six million people for nine hours. The estimated cost of the disruption was about €9.3 billion.