Many of us spend weekend nights staring outside with our phones in hand, frantically searching for the Northern Lights. But not everyone is worried about them
A cat’s hilarious reaction to the Northern Lights has left people in fits of laughter.
The Northern Lights were visible across much of the UK on Friday night – and some were lucky enough to see the rare solar storm yesterday too. People were understandably excited and flooded social media with colorful photos taken of their gardens.
But not everyone was bothered – including one guy’s oblivious cat. PJ, from Brighton, shared a photo of his unimpressed moggie sitting on a garden fence under the vibrant night sky.
Describing the scene in X, he said: “My cat has just experienced the Northern Lights – one of the world’s most radiant natural phenomena – and she doesn’t care.”
The funny post quickly went viral, racking up more than 1.7 million views and a slew of amusing comments. One responder laughed: “That cat didn’t care.”
Another joked: “Cats are the only animals that don’t care about everything.” And a third jokingly suggested: “She knows she’s actually the most radiant natural phenomenon in the world.”
If you missed the Northern Lights in Britain this weekend, don’t worry. There are signs suggesting another solar storm could be on the way.
Greenwich Observatory astronomer Greg Brown told The Mirror that Brits could once again be in for a rare treat. But he tempered expectations by noting the extreme difficulty researchers have in predicting solar storms.
“Predicting the next solar storm with any accuracy is virtually impossible,” he said. However, there are signs that another storm will approach in the coming days, which could boost the auroras again.
“In the long term, we can use the Sun’s activity cycle to predict general trends in solar storms. The Sun goes through an approximately 11-year cycle of changing activity. We are currently at solar maximum, when the Sun is most active and at Flares, sunspots and coronal mass ejections – the explosions that produce solar storms – are the most common.
“As long as we remain at the Sun’s peak, the probability of a solar storm remains quite high, although G5-class storms, the type that produced Friday’s aurora burst, are very rare even at solar maximum.”
