Everything you need to know as Northern Lights could return to the UK tonight

The Northern Lights are set to be visible for some people in the UK once again, just weeks after the natural phenomenon took over large swathes of the northern hemisphere.

Skies across the United Kingdom were lit up in May when millions were given the ability to see the aurora borealis from the comfort of their doorsteps and back gardens.

A natural phenomenon that people spend thousands to see on excursions to Iceland, millions of us saved our cash thanks to a huge solar storm that lit up the night skies from the Shetland Islands to Margate.

One US agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), categorised the solar storm as Level 5, which means 'severe' levels of geomagnetic activity hitting the Earth after explosions on the surface of the Sun.

And now, the Northern Lights are set to be visible across the UK once again, less than one month after the extreme showing.

Now for the science bit. Every 27 days, the Sun rotates on its axis. It means that solar storms regularly happen in a direction away from Earth.

But it has now come back around, with recent volatile activity on the surface of the Sun pointing directly towards us.

Stunning (Getty Stock Images)

The result? An increased chance of a repetition of what we saw in May after the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter recorded a major solar flare on 20 May.

Directed away from Earth at the time, scientists ranked it as X12. In normal speak, this means the largest solar storm recorded since September 2017 and bigger than the one we saw last month.

To put this in context, the solar flare itself is 15 times wider than Earth. So pretty massive.

Now, according to boffins at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, the Northern Lights will be visible in some areas of the United States, Europe, and Canada.

Could we see them again? (Getty Stock Images)

Across Europe, they could be visible in Norway, Sweden, Trondheim, Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki.

Ryan French, a solar physicist at the National Solar Observatory in Colorado, said that the sunspot might be visible from Earth from today (6 June).

And it could last until Sunday (9 June).

Speaking to Live Science, he said: "As soon as the sunspot starts to appear, we will enter the window of opportunity [to see the Northern Lights].

Northern Lights in Scotland (Getty Stock Images)

"Earth is most affected by solar storms when the sunspot reaches the middle of the sun as seen from our planet. That's exactly where it produced all of those large flares.

"However, we could still be affected if another solar flare is as intense as they have been. But in theory, if you had a large enough eruption, even if it's to the left of the sun's centre, we could still get the edge of that impact."