The unprecedented auroras that recently amazed millions of people around the world were among the most intense light shows our planet has experienced in half a millennium, NASA revealed. The dancing lights, which may have reached the equator, were triggered by the Earth. strongest geomagnetic storm in more than two decades.
Between May 10 and 12, our planet experienced a major geomagnetic disturbance after at least five solar storms struck Earth in a row, temporarily weakening the magnetosphere. The solar storms, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), were launched by Solar flares from the gigantic sunspot AR3664, which more than 15 times wider than the Earth at the time – the largest dark spot to appear on the Sun in a decade. Several of these solar flares achieved “X-class” status – the most powerful type of surface explosion the Sun can produce.
The resulting geomagnetic storm was mainly classified as G4 or “severe,” which is the second highest class of geomagnetic storms. But on two occasions the storm temporarily reached “extreme” G5 conditions, comparable to the fallout from the Carrington event of 1859 — the strongest solar storm in recorded history, triggering auroras as far away as Cuba and Hawaii. This was the first time Earth experienced G5 conditions since 1977. Big Halloween Storms of 2003.
Fortunately, this super-powered storm did not cause any major problems on Earth, aside from some temporary disruptions to satellites and communications. However, the event did paint large parts of our planet’s sky with vibrant, multi-coloured northern lights because the weakened magnetosphere allowed large amounts of solar radiation to bombard the upper atmosphere and excite gas molecules.
These light shows covered large parts of both hemispheres and were “possibly one of the most powerful auroral spectacles in the last 500 years,” NASA officials said. wrote in a statement.
“We will be investigating this event for years to come,” Teresa Nieves-Chinchillathe deputy director of NASA’s Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office, said in the statement. “It will help us test the limits of our models and understanding of solar storms.”
Related: Why do the Northern Lights have different colors?
Auroras usually only occur in the polar regions, where the Earth’s magnetosphere is weakest. However, during large geomagnetic storms, solar radiation can reach much further.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the auroras from the latest storm were seen as far south as Florida and Mexico, as well as across much of Europe.
In the southern hemisphere, auroras have now been observed as far north as the Galápagos Islands, some of which lie on both sides of the equator, says auroral photographer Chris Wickland. wrote on the social platform XHowever, this sighting has not been confirmed by any scientific organization or news site.
Northern lights have also been seen in the Southern Hemisphere as far as New Caledonia – an island nation in the Pacific Ocean between Australia and Tonga. A local photographer Frédéric Desmoulins captured stunning images of pink lights lighting up the sky. These are likely the first aurora photos ever taken on the island. Spaceweather.com reported.
“As far as we know, the last time skywatchers in this area saw auroras was during the Carrington Event in September 1859, when they were sighted from a ship in the Coral Sea,” Hisashi Hayakawa, a space weather researcher at Nagoya University in Japan, told Spaceweather.com.
The geomagnetic storm was so strong that the magnetic disturbance was also recorded by seafloor observatories off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada at depths of up to 4.3 kilometers, according to the University of Victoria.
On May 14, the same sunspot triggered a solar flare of magnitude 8.7—the most powerful surface explosion of the current solar cycle. However, this eruption had no effect on Earth.
The unprecedented level of solar activity is a consequence of the Sun Entering the most active phase its approximately 11-year activity cycle, known as solar maximum, which occurred earlier and is currently more active than scientists had initially expected.