A colossal solar flare will hit the Earth tomorrow, possibly causing the northern lights and blackouts.
A coronal mass ejection – a giant solar explosion sending streams of charged particles into space – fired off the sun at 1.39pm yesterday.
Space weather forecasters (yes, they’re a thing) categorised the blast of plasma as a M5.8 (moderate) flare, the second-most powerful ranking.
The eruption from the sunspot AR4436 has already triggered a radio blackout over the Atlantic Ocean.
While it’s heading away from Earth, there’s a chance it will ‘brush’ past us in the early hours tomorrow, according to the Met Office.
More flares could follow as the sunspot is now rotating into Earth’s ‘strike zone’, so any ejections from it will be on a direct path towards us.
Solar flares ‘can affect power grids and GPS’
When solar particles hit the magnetic bubble that protects our planet from radiation, it causes a geomagnetic storm, also called a solar storm.
These particles generate electrical currents and magnetic fields. All this extra energy can damage spacecraft, pipelines and railroad tracks as well as disrupt power grids.
Communication blackouts mainly involve those that use high-frequency radio waves, such as ham radio and commercial aviation.
Jim NR Dale, a meteorologist with the British Weather Services, told Metro that blackouts happen because the flares weaken radio waves.
‘This is due to ionisation within the ionosphere,’ he says, referring to the fuzzy, glowing layer of the planet which meets space.
‘Basically, the waves are blocked and dispersed.
‘The flares in the worst-case scenarios can affect other technical apparatus such as satellites, power grid outputs and GPS.’
While this means that, for the most part, your phone won’t become a brick during the storm, navigation systems may be knocked out.
Earth’s magnetosphere can get peeled back, meaning satellites in high altitudes (like GPS ones) are smashed with more radiation than usual.
Satellites in low-Earth orbit are better protected but can still experience technical hiccups, like signal dropouts and reboots.
Forecasters expect tomorrow’s ejection’s arrival to cause a G1-level geomagnetic storm.
‘That’s minor,’ Dale says, so blackouts shouldn’t be much of a worry for us Earthlings. ‘G4/5 are the biggies.’
Still, GPS is far tougher than you’d think, Lisa Dyer, executive director of the GPS Innovation Alliance, tells Metro.
‘Past experience of these events has shown us that the system continues to function normally even during intense space weather,’ she says.
‘The satellites remain safe even under extreme conditions, and we can expect operations to remain stable throughout the space weather event
Where can I see the northern lights?
But one side-effect of all this solar material is the dazzling light shows in the nighttime sky called the aurora borealis that they create.
When the particles mingle with the gases in Earth’s atmosphere, they create various colours: Oxygen creates green or red light, while blue and purple come from nitrogen.
This cosmic light show could be seen across northern Scotland tomorrow if the skies are clear enough, space forecasters say.
The monitoring service AuroraWatch UK is currently reporting no significant geomagnetic activity.
The sun’s activity ebbs and flows on an 11-year cycle and reached its peak, called solar maximum, last year. During this, the sun spits out more flares than usual.
That’s why auroras were seen as far south as London last year, as the powerful solar storms drive auroras further south.
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