This month’s enhanced auroras may have been even more remarkable than we thought.
The northern lights show this enthusiastic observers around the world two weekends ago, including people in southern Florida in the US and Ladakh in northern India, may have been among the strongest light displays of its kind on record.
“With reports from Northern lights This latest storm, visible down to the 26th magnetic latitude, could rival some of the lowest latitude aurora sightings recorded over the past five centuries, although scientists are still evaluating this ranking,” NASA officials said a statement.
“It’s a little difficult to estimate storms over time because our technology is constantly changing,” Delores Knipp, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who focuses on space weather, added in the same statement. “Aurora visibility is not a perfect measure, but it allows us to compare across centuries.”
Related: The May 2024 solar storm was strong enough to impact the deep sea
The Northern and Southern Lights are usually only a spectacle in high latitude areas such as the Arctic and northern Canada. But the bright colors moved toward the equator on May 10 because our hyperactive sun had unleashed a rare G5 geomagnetic storm a few days earlier, the strongest to hit our planet since Halloween 2003.
Between May 3rd and 9th, NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory catalogs 82 “remarkable” Solar flares Spawning from two active regions on the Sun (3363 and 3364). These sunspot clusters became so complex that they erupted repeatedly throughout the week. Starting May 7th, at least seven coronal mass ejectionsor CMES, barreled toward Earth and began storming our planet on May 10, when the strongest auroras were observed.
“The CMEs all arrived largely at the same time and the conditions were just right to produce a truly historic storm,” Elizabeth MacDonald, a space physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the statement.
This storm was so intense that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which predicts solar storms and their impact on our planet, issued a warning Storm warning For the first time in almost two decades. The warning prompted NASA to preemptively place at least one of its satellites, ICESat-2, into safe mode. Certain instruments aboard other missions were also turned off, the space agency noted in the statement.
To better understand the full extent of the event, scientists are also examining reports submitted by citizen scientists to the NASA-funded initiative called Aurorasaurus, which tracks northern lights around the world. According to the website, tweets and reports related to Aurora are compiled into a map and verified with the help of citizen scientists. Each verified report then becomes a data point that scientists can examine and potentially incorporate Space weather Models.
“We will be studying this event for years,” said Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla, deputy director of NASA’s Office of Lunar-Mars Space Weather Analysis. “It will help us test the limits of our models and understanding of solar storms.”
The cluster of sunspots that caused the historic, dazzling display of lights has disappeared from our field of vision thanks to the sun’s rotation. However, scientists say it is now coming within sight of Mars. which has already begun to be witnessed Scientists say the effects of AR3664’s most powerful flare yet, fired last Tuesday (May 14).
“We’re already starting to collect some data from Mars, so this story only continues,” said Jamie Favours, director of NASA’s Space Weather Program in Washington.