Tag: space weather

Solar storm warning: Sun ejects 50,000 mile-long ‘canyon of hot plasma’ – impact predicted

Sebastian Kettley – November 25, 2021

A so-called coronal mass ejection (CME) was seen escaping the Sun on Wednesday and may deliver a “glancing blow” to the planet. CMEs are large clouds of charged particles and magnetic field that stream from the Sun’s corona – the outermost layer of the star’s atmosphere. According to the US Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), CMEs can reach the planet at speeds between 250 km per second and 3,000 km per second.

Astronomers at SpaceWeather.com have now warned yesterday’s CME could reach the planet by Saturday.

The warning comes after a large filament erupted from the Sun’s southern hemisphere.

The filament split the Sun’s atmosphere wide open and released a cloud of debris into space.

The website’s astronomers wrote: “Imagine a canyon 50,000 miles long with towering walls of red-hot plasma.

“Yesterday, there was one on the Sun.

“It formed when a filament of magnetism lifted off from the southern hemisphere.

“The erupting filament split the Sun’s atmosphere, carving out the canyon as it ascended.

“The glowing walls remained intact for more than six hours after the explosion.”

The debris trailing from the blast was photographed by NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

Space Weather added: “First-look data suggest it might deliver a glancing blow to Earth’s magnetic field on November 28.”

https://www.express.co.uk

Solar storms are back, threatening life on Earth as we know it

The Associated Press – May 23, 2021

A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time — few people probably even knew it happened — but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.

While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple power grids, jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter. The sun began a new 11-year cycle last year and as it reaches its peak in 2025 the specter of powerful space weather creating havoc for humans grows, threatening chaos in a world that has become ever more reliant on technology since the last big storms hit 17 years ago. A recent study suggested hardening the grid could lead to $27 billion worth of benefits to the U.S. power industry.

“It is still remarkable to me the number of people, companies, who think space weather is Hollywood fiction,” said Caitlin Durkovich, a special assistant to President Joe Biden and senior director of resilience and response in the National Security Council, during a talk at a solar-weather conference last month.

The danger isn’t hypothetical. In 2017, a solar storm caused ham radios to turn to static just as the Category 5 Hurricane Irma was ripping through the Caribbean. In 2015, solar storms knocked out global positioning systems in the U.S. Northeast, a particular concern as self-driving cars become a reality. Airline pilots are at greater risk of developing cataracts when solar storms hit. Female crew see higher rates of miscarriages.

In March 1989, a solar storm over Quebec caused a province-wide outage that lasted nine hours, according to Hydro-Quebec’s website. A 2017 paper in the journal of the American Geophysical Union predicted blackouts caused by severe space weather could strike as much as 66% of the U.S. population, with economic losses reaching a potential $41.5 billion a day.

https://www.pennlive.com

Solar cycle 25: the Sun wakes up

Space Daily – October 30, 2020

The Sun has entered its 25th solar cycle and is about to wake up. For the last few years our star has been pretty sleepy, with few sunspots, bright flares or massive ejections of magnetized plasma emanating from its surface. This quiet period is known as the solar minimum, but things are starting to heat up again.

Experts on the Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel recently announced that the Sun has officially entered a new cycle, its 25th since we’ve had enough data to reliably recognize them. While we can expect space weather to get more exciting in the next few years, with peak sunspot activity expected in 2025, the panel came to the consensus that this next cycle will be very similar to the previous, both generally weaker than the average solar cycle.

“While small and medium-sized solar storms are more likely during peak solar activity,” explains Juha-Pekka Luntama, Head of ESA’s Space Weather Office, “it is important to remember that individual large solar events, huge flares and coronal mass ejections, can happen at any point, independent of where we are in the solar cycle or how strong the cycle becomes.”

If such solar storms impact Earth, they can create geomagnetic storms in our magnetosphere. While good news for aurora hunters, these storms can disrupt and even damage power grids on Earth and satellites in orbit, and the vital services they provide.

https://www.spacedaily.com