Nature offers many dazzling displays, from jagged flashes of lightning to radiant sunsets. But perhaps one of the most elusive natural phenomena is the shimmering waves of green, pink, and red dancing across the night sky,

Strong geomagnetic storms and a moderate solar radiation storm have led to an aurora view forecast for Wednesday night in the northern U.S.

After displays of auroras lit up the sky on Tuesday, another Northern Light array is expected to bring a gleaming light show to the northern part of the U.S. Wednesday.

The northern lights were visible Tuesday night across the Chicago area, illuminating the sky with brightly colorful displays due to severe solar storms.

Increased solar activity causes auroras that dance around Earth’s poles, known as the northern lights, or aurora borealis, and southern lights, or aurora australis. When the energized particles from coronal mass ejections reach Earth’s magnetic field, they interact with gases in the atmosphere to create different colored lights in the sky.

A geomagnetic storm made the aurora borealis visible across a swath of the United States again on Wednesday, illuminating the skies as far south as Arizona.

On Tuesday, NOAA issued a G4, or severe, geomagnetic storm watch in response to recent coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, from the sun. CMEs are huge bubbles of coronal plasma that the sun occasionally ejects, NASA says. The highest geomagnetic storm level is G5, which is considered extreme.

Skies over North America erupted this week with shimmering colors: Shades of pink, purple and green swayed across the skies in Northern as well as some Southern states. It followed two similarly prolific auroral displays in North America in October and May of 2024.