The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Forecasting Center released a geomagnetic storm after the coronal mass emission (CME) from the Sun late Thursday (October 30th) on Friday.
Reports indicate that CME will take more than 2 days to cross the Sun-Earth boundary, and this could hit the planet on October 30. This can affect the planet’s GPS signals.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has also recorded a “significant solar flare” erupting from the Sun, which is likely to disrupt GPS signals on Earth and increase the Earth’s northern lights. The sun on Thursday released a class X1 flash, the most intense to date, at 11.35, according to a NASA statement on Friday.
According to the US Space Weather Forecasting Center (SWPC), which monitors space weather events, the X1 class outbreak caused temporary but severe blackouts on the sunlit side of Earth from central South America. The flash came from a sunspot called AR2887, which is now located in the center of the Sun and returned to Earth based on its location, according to Spaceweather.com.
NASA said the X1 flare is likely to hit the Earth’s magnetic field on Saturday.
Solar flares are powerful flashes of radiation. Although harmful radiation from the flash cannot pass through the Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans, if it is intense enough, it can disrupt the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals propagate. It can also charge the northern lights of the Earth (aurora borealis).
When these intense flares are aimed directly at the Earth, they can also be accompanied by a massive eruption of solar particles, called coronal mass ejection. The impulsive class X1 outbreak on Thursday also “had signs of coronal mass ejection,” the SWPC reported.
According to SpaceWeather.com, it “created a huge tsunami of plasma that rippled across the solar disk: the plasma wave was about 100,000 km high and moved through the Sun’s atmosphere at a speed of 1.6 million miles per hour.”
NOAA forecasters estimate that it is expected to reach Earth with “a 60 percent chance of class M flares and a 25 percent chance of another X flare in the next 24 hours.”
Class M torches of medium size; they can cause short-term power outages that affect the Earth’s polar regions, while Class C flares are small and have little noticeable effect here on Earth.
Probably, this mass of charged particles emitted by the Sun will reach the Earth during the night and a magnetic storm will form. It is expected that the most affected areas will be at a latitude of more than 50 degrees, and Ukraine is just at this level.