Earth blasted by solar storm
Airplanes avoided the Earth’s poles. Swedes reveled in brilliant vistas of green and red that danced across the northern skies. Residents in Colorado Springs, Colo., mostly went about their normal lives, except for members of the U.S. Air Force, who watched for trouble in orbit.
It was a fiery explosion 93 million miles Earth caused all of this worry and forecasters warn that it might be a mild taste of things to come.
NASA recorded this image of the fiery explosion that blasted off the surface of the sun and shot toward the Earth.
What happened? The sun, which has weather-like patterns where it is exceptionally active, awakened from its slumber last week, signaling the start of yet another radiation-hurling, satellite-rattling period of solar storms known as the “solar maximum.”
Though the initial interstellar punch of the most recent storm was mild, astronomers and military officials warn the worst could be on the way.
“Everybody kind of has to be on their toes,” said Bryan DeBates, director of education for the Space Foundation in Colorado Springs.
Astronomers expect the current solar activity to peak in 2013, during a particularly active stretch of the sun’s 11-year cycle.
When that happens weather satellites, airplane communications, energy grids and the global positioning devices could be affected.
But trying to understand storms on the sun, and the damage they’ll cause, isn’t easy.
“We have a hard time predicting the weather in Colorado the way it is,” DeBates said. “Trying to predict this kind of thing on the sun is even more difficult.”
How it started: The latest storm began Jan. 22 on the sun’s northern hemisphere, where a massive explosion hurled a part of the sun’s corona into space.
Scientists on Earth detected the blast eight minutes later, when the first electrons — atomic particles — hit the earth. Within minutes after that, a wave of protons began bombarding the planet.
Those protons can damage satellite software and solar panels, said Terry Onsager, a physicist with the Space Weather Prediction Center, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The electrons and protons were the most powerful part of the storm, Onsager said. The storm registered as “a three,” making it the strongest storm since October 2003.
Ion blast: But the most damaging part of the storm — the geomagnetic waves — appeared to pass above the Earth and flew into open space.
Those waves of ionized solar wind usually arrive a few days after the initial explosion, often wreaking havoc with the earth’s magnetic fields and ionosphere.
Satellites can be damaged or disoriented when the ionosphere’s temperature and density changes, said Geoff McHarg, director of the Space Physics and Atmospheric Research Center at the Air Force Academy.
Those charged ions also can cause outages across electrical grids as they ripple across the Earth. It occasionally causes “bubbles” in the ionosphere that disrupt GPS signals — similar to how bubbles distort the view into a hot tub.
None of those problems were reported this past week, so now we just wait to see what happens when the next solar storm blasts in our direction..
Reported by Jakob Rodgers of the Gazette from COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.(MCT)
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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