We may get to see the aurora Tuesday night, with clear skies and a little luck. The northern lights are rare this far south and are generally seen only in the higher lattitudes. Tomorrow night might just be the exception. Last night the sun hurled another coronal mass ejection at the earth, just as it had done last week. CME’s are energetic blasts of radiation and heavily charged plasma. They can disrupt the earth’s magnetic field as well as radio and satellite communication. They also cause spectacular light shows in the form of the Aurora Borealis. According to the Washington Post:
The solar storm is the biggest since 2005, he added.
The storm will peak Tuesday when a speeding cloud of plasma and charged particles blasts past Earth, distorting the planet’s magnetic field with impacts possibly ranging as far south in latitude as Texas and Arizona.
“We expect moderate to potentially strong geomagnetic storming that can cause pipeline corrosion effects and power grid fluctuations,” Biesecker said.
NASA scientists predict that the storm will peak about 9 a.m. Tuesday, although it could peak up to seven hours earlier or later, said Michael Hesse of NASA’s Space Weather Laboratory, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. The storm is expected to continue through Wednesday.
“It’s not going to be a catastrophe, but there could be noticeable geomagnetic current induced on the electrical grid,” he said.
The storm began with a burst of X-rays shooting out of a sunspot — the same trouble spot that generated the previous storm — about 11 p.m. Sunday. A huge explosion of plasma, which scientists call a coronal mass ejection, then followed. The giant plasma cloud pushed an advancing wave of energized protons at the Earth, and that wavefront is now triggering the radiation storm in progress in the atmosphere.
The bulk of the plasma cloud — a mess of super-energized electrons and protons — is speeding toward the Earth at about 4.5 million mph, according to Hesse’s calculations, which are based on observations from NASA’s four sun-watching satellites.
“What’s special about this event is the coronal mass ejection that erupted is by far the fastest Earth-directed event of this solar cycle,” Biesecker said.
And speed matters. The faster a cloud of plasma travels, the bigger its impacts are on Earth.
The storms bring one bonus: possible strong auroras across much of North America Tuesday night.
“We’re going to be monitoring this,” Hesse said. “The models we use to predict these events are not correct all the time. But at the moment, it looks like it will be pretty interesting.”
Solar activity waxes and wanes on a roughly 11-year cycle. The current cycle is ramping up toward an expected peak in 2013 or 2014.
Keep your eyes open for the Aurora Borealis tomorrow night. The weather should clear up and it would be a rare sighting if we got a light show.
Moon, Did you see the lights? I forgot to check it out.
@Red Dawn, no, they didn’t come this far south, I am sorry to say. I hear there was quite a light show in Norway.