Keep an eye on the sky! We may get another intense northern lights display over the coming days
CBC
The sun is kicking up a storm.
In the past three days, the sun has released three powerful eruptions, two of which may give us another spectacular display of the northern lights.
The Space Weather Prediction Center (SPWC) at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is forecasting geomagnetic storms from Thursday into Saturday. But there could be even more heading our way.
The sun goes through an 11-year cycle where it goes from being very active to quiet. Currently, we are in a period when it's very active, with many sunspots.
"What we have been seeing are definitely peaks and waves… and then boom, all of a sudden the sun is is going active again," said Chris Ratzlaff, a seasoned aurora chaser from Airdrie, Alta.
"Quite literally, boom, when it puts off one of these big explosions."
These sunspots have complicated magnetic fields that, when entangled, can snap and produce a solar flare. And, very often, it is followed by a coronal mass ejection (CME), a fast-moving burst of charged particles. If Earth is in the way of the CME, it can interact with our magnetic field and produce incredible displays of aurora, which is referred to as a geomagnetic storm.
Solar flares are marked by their strength, from C to M to the most powerful, X.
Geomagnetic storms go from the weakest to strongest on a scale of G1 to G5. There was a G5 storm in May.
On Tuesday, the sun released an X7 solar flare. And just this morning, it released an X9.
As of publication, the SPWC has not issued a geomagnetic storm watch for the X9 flare. But there is a chance that the X9 could catch up to the X7, which increases our chance of a particularly good display of auroras.
There is no real limit for the X-class of flares. A solar flare in 1859, which was initially estimated to be an X15, set telegraph lines on fire. Some newer research has suggested that it could have even been X45. It is referred to as the Carrington Event, named after Richard Carrington, an astronomer who witnessed the flare on the sun.
The CME that was responsible for the geomagnetic storms in May was preceded by a several X flares, but only around X2. The resulting northern lights, or aurora borealis, could be seen as far south as Puerto Rico.
"The interesting thing about these strong ones is that they they could be visible from within cities," Ratzlaff said.
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