NEW DELHI: The sky over India is about to do something extraordinary. A massive solar storm is hitting Earth tonight, and auroras, popularly known as northern lights, are closer to home than you ever imagined. Here is everything you need to know before midnight.
The Sun has been building to this for days.
The star erupted on June 6, 2026, exploding a billion-tonne cloud of magnetised plasma into space at 1,400 kilometres per second, the way the ocean throws a wave, with a force that has no interest in what stands in its way.
That cloud has been travelling for two days. It is here now, and is hitting Earth on Monday.
The Space Weather Prediction Centre has issued a G3, or strong, geomagnetic storm watch, with brief G4, or severe, periods possible. The storm peaks between 11:30 PM IST tonight and 2:30 AM IST on Tuesday, June 9.
A geomagnetic storm is a temporary disturbance of Earth’s magnetic field caused by a surge of solar energy hitting the magnetosphere.
Breathtaking auroras could be visible from India tonight. And somewhere above the cold, silent plains of Ladakh, the sky is deciding whether to do something it has only done once before.
Auroras, popularly called the northern lights, are curtains of green, purple, and red light that ripple across the night sky when charged solar particles slam into gases in Earth’s upper atmosphere. They are, in the most literal sense, the Sun’s fury made beautiful.
They do not belong to India. This country sits too far from the poles, too deep in the latitudes where the northern lights do not ordinarily travel. The sky here is not supposed to do this.
But the sky does not always do what it is supposed to.
There is only one place in India where this story has happened before.
