Representative image
(NASA/SDO/helioviewer.org)
The past few months have been eventful for the Sun, with random blasting and coronal mass ejections. And on Friday, a huge magnetic filament zigzag through the sun’s southern hemisphere exploded. The scary part? He threw a cloud of debris towards our planet!
Space weather experts were expecting G1 (Minor) to G2 (Moderate) geomagnetic storms to hit Earth on April 24. But the blow, which came ahead of time, was far from mild.
A coronal mass ejection hit our planet’s magnetic field on April 23, creating a A severe G4-class geomagnetic storm.
Geomagnetic storms are disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by solar material from the CME – large ejections of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun’s atmosphere.
G4 storms, in particular, are the most powerful and capable of causing widespread voltage control problems in power grids and accidentally disabling critical electrical assets of the grid in protection systems. Such a geomagnetic storm could also create problems for spacecraft operations, leading to issues with shipping and surface tracking.
But these events also spark a fine northern lights!
Thanks to the intensity of this solar storm, the twilight It spread across Europe, with sights as far south as France.
The aurora borealis in Europe were so bright they could be seen even from brightly lit urban areas.
“I run Northern Lights tours in Tromsø, Norway, but I would never have dreamed of seeing the Northern Lights from my hometown of Berlin. I went up to the balcony and enjoyed a spectacle that might just be a once in a lifetime experience in a city of 4 million people,” he wrote. Thomas Henger in Berlin, Germany.
Similar green spots have been photographed in Poland and France, while bright red aurorae have also been reported in China, according to spaceweather.com.
The storm was still going into the night, producing aurorae visible across North America.
Meanwhile, the explosion that hurled the CME toward Earth on April 21 also illuminated our planet with an intense burst of radio waves.
Solar radio bursts are an underappreciated form of space weather that results in radio drowning – static charge from the sun overwhelms normal transmissions, drowning out the sounds radio operators are trying to hear.
Solar radio bursts will happen more and more Solar Cycle 25 intensifies.
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