A “cannibal” ejection of solar plasma from the sun is due to slam into the Earth on Friday, triggering “strong” geomagnetic storms in the atmosphere that could affect electronic communications.
Cannibal coronal mass ejections are CMEs that are released from the sun after a prior CME but travel faster, overtaking and consuming the first. In this case, the slower CME was released as a plume of solar plasma and radiation on Tuesday, while the second was released the next day, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center models.
The two CMEs will combine on Thursday and then hit the Earth on Friday.
ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS
The cannibal CME colliding with Earth is forecast to cause geomagnetic storms, possibly as strong as G3 storms. Geomagnetic storms are classified on a scale from G1 (minor) to G5 (extreme), based on how much the Earth’s magnetic field is disturbed.
“When the sun hurls fastballs of magnetized chunks of its atmosphere at Earth, there is likely to be a geomagnetic storm,” Delores Knipp, a space weather research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Newsweek.
“Geomagnetic storms are literally large disturbances in Earth’s geomagnetic field,” she said. “These have been measured for years with devices located worldwide called magnetometers. There is a strong association with such disturbances and the appearance of aurora at latitudes closer to the equator than normal.”
She said fast CMEs are the primary cause of geomagnetic storms because CMEs carry the material and magnetic field that can interact with Earth’s magnetic field.
“They usually take 48 to 72 hours to arrive at Earth, but as I’ve written about, some CMEs are hyper-fast. One in 1972 arrived in only 14 hours. That was a tough storm that caused a lot of problems,” Knipp said.
More powerful geomagnetic storms are less frequent: There may be only 100 G4 storms and four G5 storms during an 11-year solar cycle. G3 storms—the ones forecast to occur because of the cannibal CME—are classed as “strong” on the NOAA’s G-scale, with around 200 occurring per cycle.
NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
These G3 storms can lead to problems with electronics on Earth, as well as scrambling radio waves and even causing increased drag on satellites orbiting close to the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Since these storms are electromagnetic in nature, they have the most apparent effect on electromagnetic technologies such as communications, navigation satellites and the power grid,” said Roger Dube, a professor of physics at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
“High-altitude flights are always notified of geomagnetic storms since crew and passengers would be exposed to much stronger radiation if they are higher up than sea level,” Dube told Newsweek.
More powerful geomagnetic storms may also lead to brighter and farther-reaching northern lights because of how the solar plasma reacts with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.
“The colors in the aurora are the result of particles in the upper atmosphere becoming excited by collisions with particles coming from within the magnetosphere and some from within the solar wind,” Brett Carter, an associate professor in space science at RMIT University in Australia, previously told Newsweek.
“The different colors are the result of electrons relaxing from different energy levels from oxygen—the most common reds and greens—and nitrogen—dark reds/blues,” he said.
More red light is emitted higher up in the atmosphere, meaning that auroras seen from further south appear more red in the sky. G3 storms can cause red auroras to be seen as far south as Illinois and Oregon.
One of the most powerful geomagnetic storms in history caused auroras to be seen all the way to the tropics.
A CME that hit the Earth in February 1872 is thought to have caused northern and southern lights that stretched nearly to the equator, new research in The Astrophysical Journal reveals.
The spectacular display could be spotted as far south as Bombay—now Mumbai—and Khartoum, which is only 15 degrees above the equator. For comparison, New York City is 40 degrees north of the equator.
The international team of scientists from nine countries found that telegraph communications were disrupted by the event, known as the Chapman-Silverman storm.
“Our findings confirm the Chapman-Silverman storm in February 1872 as one of the most extreme geomagnetic storms in recent history. Its size rivaled those of the Carrington storm in September 1859 and the NY Railroad storm in May 1921,” Hisashi Hayakawa, an assistant professor at Nagoya University in Japan and paper a co-author of the paper, said in a statement.
“This means that we now know that the world has seen at least three geomagnetic superstorms in the last two centuries. Space weather events that could cause such a major impact represent a risk that cannot be discounted,” Hayakawa said.
The most powerful CME in recorded history, the Carrington Event, occurred only a few years before Chapman-Silverman, in 1859, which indicates that these kinds of powerful solar storms are more common than we first thought.
“The longer the power supply could be cut off, the more society, especially those living in urban areas, will struggle to cope,” Hayakawa said. “It would be extremely challenging.”
Hayakawa continued: “Such extreme events are rare. On the one hand, we are fortunate to have missed such superstorms in the modern time. On the other hand, the occurrence of three such superstorms in six decades shows that the threat to modern society is real. Therefore, the preservation and analysis of historical records is important to assess, understand and mitigate the impact of such events.”
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.