2024 was a good year for spectacular space shows, some of which were visible from our own backyard.
First, it was the total solar eclipse early April. Then, late last week, the sun became the “star” attraction again: a huge sunspot caused a series of solar storms strengthened the auroramaking the ethereal view visible from much of the United States, Europe and many other parts of the world.
Personally, after being completely overwhelmed with emotions experiencing the total solar eclipse in Dallas, I thought this would be the highlight of the year for space and science for me. But the mystical minutes of Friday evening seeing the northern Lights with my mom in my hometown of Cleveland was so special.
Related: Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis): what they are and how to see them
This might not happen again for a while, and that evening everything just happened to come together. Looking at my mother with childlike joy and appreciation for science and space, getting giddy and taking pictures together – these are moments I will cherish for the rest of my life. I also shared the experience via text message with friends and family across the country, making it difficult to decide which sky sight claims the top spot!
If I can get this off my chest quickly, I was awestruck by the beauty of the aurora (no pun intended). Seeing the Northern Lights was on my bucket list, and I thought checking that box would require careful planning and travel to get to a location where the phenomenon is more common. Instead, it happened in the backyard where I grew up, with my mom over Mother’s Day weekend – absolutely perfect, if I say so myself! We even saw the Big dipper during the heavenly show (and took a photo of it; thank you to the incredible technology in our phones)!
‘Perfect’ is also the word scientists use to describe how everything went down Friday evening. For the aurora to be as widely visible as before, there must be a level of interaction between a strong one coronal mass ejection (CME) – an eruption that produces super-hot plasma from the Sun – and the Earth’s magnetic field.
“[The aurora] was one of those rare moments where you can be one with Mother Earth, with the cosmos; it was pretty perfect. When it is a perfect pairing, where the negative sides meet the positive sides, it brings in all the energy; that’s what we want,” Bill Murtagh, program coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Center for Space Weather Forecasting (SWPC), Space.com said over the phone.
“Friday was absolutely remarkable; the aurora was visible as far away as the Florida Keys, Puerto Rico and Mexico,” Murtagh added.
The number of CMEs responsible for this historic event is impressive, with all moving at different speeds and trajectories. For a geomagnetic storm to reach its most powerful level – G5 on the SWPC scale – the CMEs must merge or approach Earth at or around the same time.
“What complicates matters is that some of the faster ones overtake the slower ones, and it tends to amplify the situation; it presents a more complex scenario that results in a greater response,” Murtagh said. “And after the first CME arrives, it is difficult to distinguish the characteristics of the other CMEs that may follow if the existing storm is so intense. Sometimes you see the term cannibalize – one CME cannibalizes another and then another. is what happened in this situation.”
According to the SWPC, Friday’s event was the first extreme geomagnetic storm since 2003. That was the last time we had a G5-level geomagnetic storm; it took place in late October of that year, creating quite a stir spooktacular event in the run-up to Halloween. Murtagh said the worst-case scenarios almost always involve multiple CMEs, like the famous one Carrington event in 1859 and then the Superstorm on the New York Railroad in 1921.
But before we can see the sparkle of the aurora in the evening sky and the creation of geomagnetic storms from raging CMEs, we have to go back to the source: large and magnetically complex sunspot clusters on the solar surface. Scientists say such large clusters are not that unusual, but to produce so many CMEs that result in a G5 geomagnetic storm – that usually only happens a few times in an eleven-year solar cycle.
“We haven’t had any G5 storms in the last 11 years. When a sunspot group develops, it is typically one to three times the size of Earth. The magnetic complexity can cause a small solar flare, but not much. This was a sunspot that grew and continued to grow into the behemoth it is today, fifteen times its size SoilMurtagh said. “It’s so complex that it has erupted repeatedly over the past week.”
One complete rotation of the sun takes 27 days. As we approach the end of the first half of this week, the sunspot cluster will disappear from view. But until then, strong solar flares and more Earth-centered CMEs are still possible.
While the geomagnetic storm gave us a great skywatching weekend, there is another side of the coin: potential negative impacts on technology, including power grids, GPS and satellites. So far, there There are reports of some consequences, including irregularities in electricity networks and degradation of high-frequency communications, GPS and possibly satellite navigation. But we have had solar events in the past that have caused much more disruption.
An example was a class X4 solar flare in March 1989 accompanied by a CME that interacted with Earth’s magnetic field more powerfully than predicted, leading to a power grid collapse in Quebec and significant impacts to the U.S. power grid from the Carolinas to California. Such events remind us how important it is to pay attention to space weather forecasts, just as we do when it comes to bad weather here on Earth. This allows us to prepare for the worst-case scenario if it comes to that, as scientists still face many limitations when it comes to the final leg of an Earth-centered CME’s journey to our planet.
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“It’s a bad day when we encounter one of the CMEs and it comes in much stronger than expected. I don’t know that until the last minute when it hits the L1 spacecraft, and now I have 15 minutes before it hits Earth. ” magnetic field, so not much lead time,” Murtagh said. (L1 is the Lagrange point 1 of Earth and the Sun, a gravitationally stable spot in space nearly 1 million miles or 1.6 million kilometers from our planet in the direction of the sun. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft, a joint mission of NASA and the European Space Agencyis stationed at L1.)
“It would almost be like telling someone we’re expecting a Category 2 hurricane and then giving them 15 minutes of lead time and oops, it’s actually a Cat 5. That’s our fear,” Murtagh said. “If we can make a good forecast, they can take the mitigation measures in preparation, and guess what happens? Nothing. And that’s the goal; just nice lights and no loss or damage to the infrastructure. So far, so far, so good. Good.”
Editor’s Note: If you take a stunning photo or video of the Northern Lights (or Southern Lights!) and would like to share it with Space.com for a possible story, please submit images, comment on the view and your location, and use permissions to spacephotos@space.com.