Intense storms raging on the sun made the night sky shimmer red and green from Reno, Nev., as far south as southern New Mexico, and scientists say the storms could briefly disrupt telecommunications as they continue through the weekend. [ The sunspot group and its resulting solar flare and eruptions developed Wednesday and early Thursday morning. Traveling at speeds in excess of a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per hour and traversing the 93 million miles (149.7 million kilometers) from the Sun to Earth, the energy could reach our planet as soon as late Friday.It's a fast one, so it will be faster than the typical three-day trend," said Barbara Thompson, a solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "This eruption was from a sunspot group that is on the Sun. Sunspots are the most concentrated form of magnetic field on the Sun. These compact ones move faster. It was quiet for a whole month and now this. I can't believe how large that sucker was." On a scale ranging from 1 to 5, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Environment Center (SEC) has given a ranking of 3 to the incoming storm. 
Sunspot 9393 (highlighted) has released a burst of matter headed for Earth The size of the sunspot group, called sunspot 9393, is equivalent to the total surface area of 13 Earths. It is dangerous to look directly at the Sun, but some drivers report glimpsing sunspots of this size at sunset. Looking directly at the Sun without number-14 welder's glasses or analogous protection causes blindness. The flare and so-called coronal mass ejections (CME) generated by the sunspot group could deliver a double hit of charged particles, called plasma, to Earth's magnetic field. The first blast should come Friday, with the second following on Saturday.The state of solar weather prediction is no more refined than forecasts for weather on Earth. The exact arrival time of the solar storm is unknown. Next page: Monitoring the sun. ~ A worldwide network of 14 magnetic observatories operated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is monitoring the geomagnetic field that is expected to become quite disturbed as result of this solar activity. While geomagnetic storms give rise to the beautiful northern and southern lights, they can also pose a serious threat for commercial and military satellite operators, power companies and astronauts. They can even shorten the life of oil pipelines in Alaska by increasing pipeline corrosion, as well as disrupt cable television, cellular telephones and pager service.
A close-up of sunspot 9393 Geomagnetic storms occur when plasma collides with Earth's magnetic field causing it to fluctuate wildly. These fluctuations cause currents to flow in conductors on the ground and in space. "Any individual spacecraft has a very low probability of experiencing any effects based on what we know, but once we see an effect on the space environment and see which are in hazardous areas, we can get a lot higher probability of damage," Thompson said. "The same goes with ground systems and power systems. It's not until the thing has an effect on geospace that we can see how the probability manifests itself." Most space systems operators are taking a wait-and-see approach to incoming solar storms since prediction schemes for space weather are so faulty, Thompson said. Skywatchers already have seen an increase in auroral activity in recent weeks, associated with the current solar maximum -- a peak in solar activity that recurs every 11 years. With the incoming solar storm, hopes are high for more beautiful sky displays -- at least at polar latitudes.The chances for more incoming weather are high with the SEC predicting a 30-percent chance for more of the strongest (X-class) solar flares in the next day and an 80-percent chance for the second strongest (M-class) solar flares. Improvements in solar weather prediction may come in 2004 with the launch of a mission called Solar Stereo. That mission will send two spacecraft to watch the Sun's eruptions simultaneously to provide better data on how solar weather proceeds through space. Most efforts to link human behavior to sunspots are specious, but animals that rely on Earth's magnetic field for navigation -- such as carrier pigeons and whales -- may react to solar storms. "There isn't much evidence that humans respond to minor variations in magnetic fields, so I think that's mostly hokey," Thompson said.
|
advertisement
