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full screen Northern lights over German Freiburg late on Friday evening. Photo: Valentin Gensch/AP/TT
The strongest solar storm in more than 20 years reached Earth late on Friday and brought with it light phenomena that were seen in both Tasmania and the British Isles.
According to the US weather agency NOAA, it is an “extreme” geomagnetic storm, the first of its kind since the “Halloween storm” in 2003.
In a so-called solar flare, a “solar flare” or solar eruption, a cascade of charged particles is thrown into space in a solar storm that sometimes hits the Earth.