Dynamic patterns of glowing green, pink and purple have been spotted by stargazers as far south as Kent and Cornwall.
The natural light display, also known as an aurora, is typically seen in high-latitude regions around the Arctic and Antarctic.
It is formed by a solar flare erupting on the Sun, which releases electrically charged particles that collide with gas molecules in Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The interaction emits green and red colours over our poles, meaning in the UK the Northern Lights are often only visible in Scotland and parts of northern England.
However, in a rare occurrence, the phenomenon has been seen in the South of England, and is expected to be visible in parts of the UK again tonight.
A spokesman from the Met Office shared images taken of the brilliant light display from across the country last night.
“A coronal hole high speed stream arrived this evening combined with a rather fast coronal mass ejection leading to #Aurora sightings across the UK,” the spokesman wrote in a tweet late last night.
Tom Kerss, a Royal Observatory astronomer, described the process by which huge clouds of electrically charged particles, generated by solar storms, interact with the earth’s atmosphere.
“These particles then slam into atoms and molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere and essentially heat them up,” he told the Royal Museums Greenwich. “We call this physical process ‘excitation’, but it’s very much like heating a gas and making it glow.”
What stargazers are seeing therefore are atoms and molecules in our atmosphere colliding with particles from the Sun, according to The Royal Observatory, and the aurora's wavy patterns and 'curtains' of light are caused by the lines of force in the Earth’s magnetic field.
