Northern lights dazzle skies across the U.S. and world as severe solar storm hits Earth

For the second time in as many weeks, a “severe” geomagnetic storm produced a dazzling northern lights show, on Thursday, for millions of stargazers in the United States and around the world.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, the solar storm was classified as a G4 out of G5 on the severity scale, making the aurora borealis, or northern lights, visible as far south as Texas and Florida.

Photographers across the world captured images of the celestial display.

Geomagnetic storms occur when explosions on the sun trigger eruptions of solar material known as “coronal mass ejections,” or “where a billion tons or so of plasma from the sun, with its embedded magnetic field, arrives at Earth,” NOAA explained.

The agency had warned that the storm could cause power grid fluctuations and briefly disrupt satellite, radio and GPS communications.

But NOAA said that the warning was mostly “to notify officials and critical infrastructure operators, so you can enjoy the beauty of the aurora.”