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A moderate solar storm will hit Earth today (September 27), potentially causing the aurora to dance across the sky at much lower latitudes than usual. As a result, the Northern Lights can be seen tonight in the northern United States including New York, Wisconsin and Washington state, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA).
The storm – which is made up of charged solar particles seeping into space – can also cause satellite disturbances and “power grid fluctuations” at high latitudes (particularly above the 55th parallel north, a line that crosses the Canada, Northern Ireland and much of Russia), NOAA said.
However, the storm will remain relatively weak, ranking as a G2 level storm on a five level scale where G5 is most severe. Only in storms of category G4 and above are widespread power outages expected, according to NOAA.
Solar storms are a common form of space weather, occurring when coronal mass ejections (CMEs) belch out of the sun’s outermost atmosphere and strike the Earth. magnetic shield. CMEs are huge balls of plasma (electrically charged gases that make up all the stars in the universe) that escape the sun’s atmosphere and hover in space at hundreds or even thousands of kilometers per second. According to NOAA, it takes about 15 to 18 hours for a CME to reach Earth after leaving the sun.
Up to four CMEs could be bound for Earth right now, NOAA said.
What happens next depends on the strength of each CME. Benign storms, like the one predicted for today, crash into Earth’s magnetic shield, compressing it slightly. During the collision, charged solar particles slide along our planet’s magnetic field lines toward the poles, colliding with atmospheric molecules along the way. These stirred molecules release energy in the form of light, glowing in stunning red, green, blue and yellow bands. This is how the auroras are produced.
In general, the stronger a storm, the more widely the resulting auroras are visible at lower latitudes. But very strong G5 storms can do much more. An infamous 1859 geomagnetic storm known as The Carrington event disturbed the earth’s magnetosphere so badly that the telegraph wires ignited. Another storm, which struck in March 1989, blackened the Canadian province of Quebec for nine hours and caused power outages across North America.
Tonight’s storm will be nothing compared to those past disasters, according to NOAA’s predictions, but it won’t be the last we’ll see. The sun is approaching a period known as the solar maximum, the most active part of its 11-year cycle. During the maximum, the sun’s magnetic field, which controls CMEs and other solar weather conditions, is at its strongest, resulting in increasingly strong solar storms.
Solar activity is expected to increase gradually until July 2025, when it will slow down and approach a new solar minimum, according to NASA.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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