The Northern Lights are known top travel bucket lists and draw countless travellers to the world’s artic regions — but many Australians are unaware that an identical phenomenon is visible in their own backyard.
The Aurora Australis, or the Southern Lights, takes place above the South Pole and is regularly visible from Australia’s southernmost state.
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Auroras are magnetic storms commonly seen in the night skies nearest to polar regions.
They occur when the sun expels a particle-filled solar wind blown into Earth’s magnetic field.
Once inside Earth’s magnetosphere, the particles are pulled toward the north and south where they collide with and become energised by a range of gases and atoms.
The phenomenon creates a natural light show visible from the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere. However, the latter display is arguably lesser known than its northern counterpart, the Aurora Borealis.
7NEWS.com.au spoke to Australian National University astrophysicist Brad Tucker to explain the oft-overlooked Aurora Australis.
Where to see the Aurora Australis
The auroras are most visible closest to the poles, so getting as far south as you can is the best way to view the Southern Lights.
In Australia, Tasmania’s southernmost tip is a great place to witness the Southern Lights.
For an alternative perspective, the Apple Isle’s southern mountain-tops, such as in the Huon Valley, also offer broad horizons.
Closer to Hobart, popular viewing locations include Dodges Ferry, Howden, Rosny Hill, Seven Mile, Tinderbox, Mount Nelson and Mount Wellington, according to Tasmania.com.
Sightings of the Aurora Australis are not just limited to Tasmania. During “intense magnetic activity” Geoscience Australia said “Auroral displays have been reported from as far north as Queensland”.
The Southern Lights are also visible in New Zealand, Chile and Argentina and as close to the South Pole as you can get by plane. Qantas even offers Aurora Australis flights to allow passengers to spot the phenomenon from the sky.
When to look up
Like most natural light shows at night, the less light-polluted your surroundings are, the better. Avoid sky-gazing during a full moon for the best result.
Winter is the most preferable season to view an aurora for two reasons: the Earth’s orientation toward the sun, and the length of darkness throughout the night.
A cloudless sky between the hours of 11pm and 2am provides the best viewing window, according to the Australian Academy of Science (AAS).
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology releases solar wind forecasts and alerts, so you can check how favourable the space weather is for aurora viewings each day.
A truly epic show is predicted every 11 years, when the magnetic field of the sun flips, causing a huge ejection of energy outwards into the universe. This is the same matter which triggers the auroras.
That’s why auroras often work in an 11-year cycle — and we’re entering one right now.
“You actually get peaks where you get years of good viewing, and years of less. We’ve just entered that period, so the next three to four years, we’ll have more common occurrences of aurora,” Tucker told 7NEWS.com.au
The next coronal mass ejection — large releases of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — is predicted for July 2025, AAS said.
What is an Aurora?
The Aurora Australis and the Aurora Borealis “are essentially storms that leave the sun, travel through space, and then slam into the Earth’s atmosphere,” Tucker said.
“Because the gas that leaves the sun is essentially electrically charged — it’s plasma — as it hits our atmosphere it kind of creates electrical currents.
“So, you get this electrically charged gas hitting our magnetic bubble and this excites the gas in our atmosphere and that makes it glow the green, and purple and red colours. It’s nature’s neon light.”
Southern Lights vs Northern Lights
The Southern Lights and the Northern Lights are the exact same phenomena, but the latter attracts more attention because it is visible from more places than the Southern Lights are, along with a general Northern-Hemisphere bias, Tucker said.
“The Aurora Borealis, the advantage it has, is that there are a lot of people who live in areas where you more naturally see it,” he said.
“I think there’s just so few people that regularly see the aurora in the Southern Hemisphere.”
Canada, Northern Europe and Russia all fall within 50-degrees north of the equator and higher, whereas only the southernmost tip of Chile and Argentina fall below the area 50-degrees south of the equator.
Images of the Northern Lights also seem to more frequently offer more intense greens than the Southern Lights, and that is in part due to what photographers have managed to capture so far, but also because of “the density of the atmosphere that’s being hit at the time,” Tucker said.
“The North and the South are slightly different. A great example is that we have less ozone, which is less oxygen, in the Southern Hemisphere in the Summer, and the colours are linked to the gas,” he said.
“Nitrogen and oxygen will give a green or reddish-purple colour, so that’s really what you’re seeing there.”
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