Veerle's blog

This is no Star Trek! An intense storm of radiation is heading toward Earth today after a giant solar flare (one of the largest ever detected!) hurled high-energy particles from the sun’s surface Tuesday at more than 4 million miles an hour. High-frequency radio communications—mostly military and aircraft—could be blacked out worldwide,… If things starting acting a little weird today, you know what’s causing it… but if you by any chance start behaving strangely forget blaming it on the solar flare :-P

Also electric power grids could experience major voltage surges, satellite navigation and sensitive instruments aboard near- Earth spacecraft could be disrupted, and electric currents flowing along oil pipelines could be intensified, space weather forecasters warned. Officials managing those facilities, however, have handled significant geomagnetic storms in the past, and they began taking steps to protect their equipment as soon as the warnings came.

Normal radio and television broadcasts will not be affected by the high- energy storm, said experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colo. They said the storm posed no health danger to people, whether indoors or out. The geomagnetic storm, one of the most intense on recent record, should reach Earth early this morning and last at least 24 hours, according to Michael Weaver of the NOAA space weather center.

A NOAA update Tuesday night indicated “space weather for the next week is expected to reach extreme levels.” Originating in what scientists call a Coronal Mass Ejection, or CME, the storm of radiation and electrically charged particles burst from Tuesday’s solar flare, which erupted out of a huge sunspot more than 100,000 miles across, shortly before 3 a.m.

The sunspot is an active region of electrically charged solar material that began churning more than 100,000 miles beneath the sun’s visible surface. It is the largest of three such areas now crossing the solar disk, and the flare that erupted from it was located almost precisely at the center of that disk—which meant that its full energy was aimed directly toward Earth, said Weaver and Bill Murtagh, another NOAA space weather forecaster.

“This is the real thing,’’ said John Kohl of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “The eruption was positioned perfectly. It’s headed straight for us like a freight train, so a major geomagnetic storm is bound to happen when it reaches us.”

Within 30 minutes after the flare’s eruption Tuesday, NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer satellite, stationed between the Earth and the sun about a million miles above the planet’s surface, encountered the first fury of the blast when a huge pulse of protons—the electrically charged hearts of hydrogen atoms—hit the spacecraft’s detectors.

NOAA experts, alerted of the proton storm by the ACE satellite, immediately relayed warnings to power companies, airlines, NASA officials and communication companies that a major geomagnetic storm was brewing. Checking the power of the approaching geomagnetic storm, Bruce Tsurutani, a plasma physicist and senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: “It’s coming, it’s fast, and it’s potentially dangerous.”