by 2024 has been a great year for amazing space shows, some of which can be seen from our own backyard.
First, it was the total solar eclipse at the beginning of April. Then, late last week, the sun the “star” came to attract again: A huge sunspot sent a series of solar storms to supercharged the auroramaking the ethereal scene visible from much of the United States, Europe and many other parts of the world.
Personally, after being completely overwhelmed with emotions experiencing the total solar eclipse in Dallas, I thought that was the highlight of the year for me for space and science. But a mystical moment on Friday night looking at the northern lights with my mom in my hometown of Cleveland that was so special.
Related: Northern Lights (aurora borealis): What they are & how to see them
This might not happen again for a while, and everything came together serendipitously that evening. Watching my mom with a child’s joy and respect for science and space, and getting giddy and taking photos together – those are the moments that will be close to me for the rest of my life. I also shared the experience via text with friends and family across the country, making it difficult to decide which heavenly view claimed the best spot!
If I can geek out with you quickly: I was star struck by the beauty of the aurora (no pun intended). The northern lights were on my bucket list to see, and I thought it would take careful planning and careful travel to check that box to a place where the phenomenon is more common. Instead, it happened in the backyard where I grew up, with my mom on Mother’s Day weekend – pretty perfect, if I do say so myself! We even saw the Big Dipper during the heavenly show (and took a photo of it; thanks to the incredible technology in our phones)!
“Perfect” is the word scientists are also using to describe how everything happened on Friday evening. For the aurora to be as visible as it was, there must be a strong level of interaction coronary mass ejection (CME) — an eruption that sends an explosion of superheated plasma from the sun — and the Earth’s magnetic field.
“[The aurora] which was one of those rare moments that you can be at one with Mother Earth, with the cosmos; it was pretty perfect. When it is perfectly coupled, the negative ends meet the positive ends, which brings in all the energy; that’s what we need,” Bill Murtagh, program coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), Space.com said by phone.
“Friday was really impressive; the aurora was visible right down to the Florida Keys, Puerto Rico and Mexico,” Murtagh said.
The number of CMEs responsible for this historic event is staggering, each moving at different speeds and trajectories. For a geomagnetic storm to reach its most powerful level — G5 on the SWPC scale — the CMEs must merge or approach Earth at or around the same time.
“The trick is that some of the faster ones catch up with the slower ones, and it often escalates the situation; it presents a more complex situation that leads to a bigger response,” said Murtagh. “And after the first CME arrives, it is difficult to understand the features of the other CMEs that may follow when the existing storm is so intense. Sometimes you will see the term cannibalize – one CME cannibalizes another another and then another in this case.”
According to the SWPC, Friday’s event was the first major geomagnetic storm since 2003. That was the last time we had a G5-level geomagnetic storm; it happened in late October of that year, which created many a spooktacular event before Halloween. Murtagh said the worst-case scenarios almost always involve multiple CMEs, such as the famous ones Carrington’s departure in 1859 and then the The New York Railroad Superstorm of 1921.
But before we can find the sparkle of the aurora in the evening sky and the creation of geomagnetic storms from raging CMEs, we must go back to the source: large and complex magnetically. sun spot clusters on the surface of the sun. Scientists say that such large clusters are not unusual, but to produce so many CMEs that lead to a G5 geomagnetic storm – which usually only happens a few times every 11-year solar cycle.
“We have not had any G5 storms in the last 11 years cycle. When a sunspot group develops, it is usually anywhere from one to three times the size of the Earth. The magnetic complexity could produce a small flare, but not in This was a sunspot that grew and continued to grow into the behemoth it is now, 15 times larger. World,” Murtagh said. “It’s so complicated that it has erupted several times over the past week.”
One complete rotation for the sun takes 27 days. As we approach the end of the first half of this week, the sunspot cluster will move out of sight. But until then, there is still a chance of strong solar flares and more Earth-centered CMEs.
While the geomagnetic storm gave us a great weekend glimpse, there is another side to the coin: potential negative impacts on technology including power grids, GPS and satellites. So far, there reports of some impacts, including irregularities in power grids and possible degradation to high frequency communications, GPS and satellite navigation. But we’ve had solar events in the past that caused much more disruption.
One example was an X4-class solar flare in March 1989 along with a CME that interacted more powerfully with the Earth’s magnetic field than predicted, resulting in grid down in Quebec and significant effects on the US grid from the Carolinas to California. Such events serve as a reminder of the importance of paying attention to space weather forecasts, just as we do when it comes to bad weather here on Earth. This allows us to prepare for the worst case scenario if it reaches that point, as scientists still have many limitations to overcome regarding the final part of the Earth-oriented CME’s journey towards our planet.
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“It’s a bad day when we get one of the CMEs and it comes in much stronger than expected. I don’t know until the last minute when it hits the L1 spacecraft, and now it’s I have 15 minutes before it affects the Earth’s magnetic field, so there’s not much lead time,” said Murtagh. (L1 is the Earth’s Sun Lagrange Point 1, a stable gravitational spot in space nearly 1 million miles, or 1.6 million kilometers, from our planet toward the sun. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft, a joint mission of NASA and the European Space Agencylocated at L1.)
“It would almost be like telling someone we’re expecting a Category 2 hurricane and then give 15 minutes of lead time and oops, it’s actually a Cat 5. That’s our fear,” Murtagh said . “If we can produce a good forecast, they can take the mitigating actions in preparation, and guess what happens? Nothing. And that’s the objective; just beautiful lights and no loss or infrastructure damage.
Editor’s note: If you take a great photo or video of the northern lights (or southern lights!) and want to share them with Space.com for a story, send images, a comment on the sighting and your location, as well as permissions to use to spacephotos@space.com.
