US scientists predict that on Thursday morning, a large ball of plasma and accompanying magnetic field blasted from the Sun will reach Earth, possibly causing auroras as far south as Alabama.
It occurs at a time when the Sun’s activity is at its highest point, probably nearing the end of its 11-year cycle.
The world saw its strongest geomagnetic storms in the past 20 years in May, which lit up night skies far from the poles in vibrant displays.
“The current anticipation is that it is going to arrive tomorrow morning to midday, Eastern time, and perhaps continue on into the following day,” Shawn Dahl of the Space Weather Prediction Center told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday.
With a speed of 2.5 million miles per hour (four million kilometers per hour), the coronal mass ejection (CME) is moving through space, prompting the agency to issue a level 4 geomagnetic storm watch (G4).
That is one level below the maximum G5, which was seen in May; nevertheless, the ultimate result can be either below or above G4.
It crosses tracking satellites a million miles from Earth, 15–30 minutes before impact, at which point better estimates can be made.
Dahl added that in order for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is already under duress from dealing with Hurricane Helene’s aftermath and the impending Hurricane Milton, to take appropriate mitigation measures, they have been notified as well as the firms that run the North American electricity system.
Geomagnetic storms can be produced when CMEs collide with Earth’s magnetosphere.
Storms have the potential to interfere with satellites in Earth’s orbit and have an impact on radio transmissions and GPS positioning systems.
They are also capable of taking down electrical systems; in October 2003, the “Halloween Storms” caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged power infrastructure in South Africa.
May’s storms disrupted precision GPS systems used by US farmers across the Midwest and caused some high-voltage transformers to trip, without large-scale disruption to the grid, said Dahl.
He continued by saying that some 5,000 satellites required their orbital levels to be adjusted since the storm causes the ionosphere to expand, which slows down and de-orbits the spacecraft.
Auroras would be most visible away from city lights, in the darkest skies conceivable, for individuals living in the right latitudes, possibly as far south as northern California or Alabama in the United States, researchers suggest.
People should search using their phones or cameras as modern digital photography frequently detects things that the human eye is unable to.
