Skygazers set for solar storm’s final aurora display
Anyone who missed the dazzling auroras dancing across night skies earlier had another chance, as the powerful geomagnetic storm hitting the Earth was expected to intensify yet again.
“Several intense Coronal Mass Ejections are still anticipated to reach the Earth’s outer atmosphere by later today,” the US National Weather Service said yesterday.
Those ejections – expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the Sun, known as CMES – have since Friday produced spectacular celestial shows across swaths of the Earth, far from the extreme latitudes where the auroras are normally seen.
The latest CMES were expected to reach Earth late Sunday or early yesterday, “causing severe or extreme geomagnetic storms once again and (offering) a very good chance to see magnificent aurorae much further south than normal,” said Keith Ryden, who heads the Surrey Space Centre in England.
But scientists said the intensity of anything seen Sunday night might not reach the level of Friday’s show.
“This is likely the last of the Earth-directed CMES from this particular monster sunspot,” Mathew Owens, a professor of space physics at the University of Reading, in England, said.
Still, overall, he added, “the intensity of it has taken all of us by surprise.”
Friday saw the first “extreme” geomagnetic storm since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 that caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged power infrastructure in South Africa.
Excitement over the phenomenon – and otherworldly photos of pink, green and purple night skies
– popped up across the world, from Mont Saint-michel on the French coast to Australia’s island state of Tasmania.
Late Saturday evening, pictures again trickled onto social media as people in the United States reported sightings, though not as strong as Friday night’s.