It was a few minutes after ten o’clock this Friday night when Juan San Nicolás and Salvador Sánchez, from the Fundació Institut d’Astronomia i Astronàutica de Mallorca, were carrying out an observation session of the ‘T Coronae Borealis’, a cosmic body currently erupting. The first, San Nicolás, did so from the Puig de Sant Salvador, in Felantix, while Sánchez was at the Astronomical Observatory of Mallorca, located in Costitx. However, the two experts were surprised by an unusual phenomenon on the island: an aurora borealis.
Such a sight of the northern lights from Mediterranean latitudes is unusual. If we want to see one, we usually have to go to Finland or Norway. A colleague of ours from the observatory was traveling to Finland a week ago to see them. And now it turns out that we find it here in Mallorca,” commented Salvador Sánchez.
The last one recorded in Mallorca was about ten years ago, and it was “something very brief and small,” nothing comparable to what was seen this Friday. « We started seeing it around ten at night, and an hour later it was still clearly visible. It looked great from up north on Mallorca, across the sea. “It was very big and long,” said the expert.
This appearance is due to a large, severe geomagnetic storm, a solar storm, that the Earth suffers from. “This phenomenon is observed during periods of extreme solar activity and a huge spot on the sun, akin to the solar storm of 1859 known as the ‘Carrington’ event, which led to the breakdown of telegraph networks in both Europe and the US, according to Sanchez.
