Solar Flares and Spectacular Light Show

For a second time in less than 24 hours, an energetic and fast-moving blast wave from the Sun has slammed into the Earth’s protective magnetic field, leaving everyone asking what’s next?

The first of these titanic bubbles of charged particles known as coronal mass ejections gave our planet only a glancing blow in the pre-dawn hours of Friday morning, and generated some muted auroras for skywatchers as far south as Arizona.
Skywatchers in parts of Canada and some northern U.S. states reported on social media distinct but mild displays of green glows in the early morning skies of Friday. But if forecasters have it right, the best sky show is to come Friday and Saturday night.
Attention has turned to the second, more powerful CME expected to hit the Earth directly today. NASA astronomers are reporting that at 11 a.m. EDT today the space agency’s ACE sun monitoring satellite indeed detected the arrival of the second blast wave, which appears five times more powerful than the first one.
“The ACE satellite sits about a million miles ahead of the Earth – between us and the Sun – and is our solar activity watchdog,”  said Alex Young, an associate director in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Much like those early-warning buoys we have in our oceans for tsunami waves, this satellite measures the magnetic field of the solar wind, giving us a heads-up on these denser blobs of material associated with incoming solar blasts.”





These giant cosmic tidal waves, each many times larger than our planet, were both fired off by the Sun on Tuesday and Wednesday as massive flares. The second one that erupted over a giant sunspot complex was ranked as an X-class flare, considered the most powerful level on the solar storm Richter scale. Within a short time, the flare’s effects were felt on the sun-facing side of Earth with radio operators reporting long-lasting loud static in high frequency channels.
"The ultraviolet radiation that ripped through the sun’s atmosphere with Wednesday’s event travelled at the speed of light and impacted our planet within minutes,” said Alex Young, an associate director in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“While the CME generated by the X-class flare on Wednesday may not be as speedy, it traveled across interplanetary space at speeds of 1,500 kilometres per second, taking less than two days to get here. So this indicates this is a rarer and significant space weather event.”
If these CMEs are intense enough, they can actually fry circuit boards of communication satellites and bring down power grids. Back in March of 1989, a massive CME brought about an intense geomagnetic storm that not only sparked a spectacular northern lights show, but shut down the entire Hydro-Quebec power grid for hours, leaving millions of Quebecers without power.

The best bet to catch some northern lights action will be tonight, with the best shows most likely closer to local midnight when skies are darkest, said Raminder Singh Samra, an astronomer at H. R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver.
“The best times to watch the auroras would be when it’s darkest, and because right now the moon rises later each night, the ideal time to observe the northern lights would be prior to moonrise,” he said.

Weather permitting, brighter, more intense displays of northern lights may be visible across northern Europe at first, and then more northerly parts of Canada through Inuvik, Yellowknife, Edmonton, and Winnipeg.
Observers in more southern regions of Canada may also luck out, Young said. Even areas of Pennsylvania and Maryland may see muted but colourful auroras, just closer to the northern horizon.
“At this point it’s a wait-and-see situation,” Young explained.
“Many times auroras really kick in only hours after the CME arrival – so in terms of how good the displays can get, it really is a matter of timing and a bit of luck – and of course clear skies.”