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Earth is being bombarded by a severe solar storm with a big geomagnetic jolt on Tuesday, disrupting electric power grids, power to homes and GPS tracking while pushing the colorful northern lights farther south.
Solar storm or solar flare is the result of explosion, flash of brightness on the sun’s surface that threw coronal mass ejections, globs-a billions tons of the suns plasma along the magnetic clouds of charged atomic particles like electron, ions in the direction of Earth and the storm may take one or two days to reach earth.
From Europe to Northern Ireland to Alaska and as far south as North Carolina, the lights exploded into the night sky dancing and glowing shades of greens and pinks, purples and reds.
This event is caused by severe geomagnetic storm said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A news conference was held on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the storm and its effects, the storm will likely subside by Wednesday.
It is said that is the strongest so far in this solar cycle, which occurs about every 11 years
Thomas Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado said there were two blasts of magnetic plasma which combined and arrived on Earth about 15 hours earlier.
“It’s significantly stronger than expected,” Berger said. Forecasters had predicted a glancing blow instead of dead-on hit. Another theory is that the combination of the two storms made it worse, but it’s too early to tell if that’s so, he said.
Geomagnetic storms are rated on their intensity from one to five. This week event is rated as G4 a severe storm.
