Our home Planet Earth is being currently hit by a Solar Storm of charged particles. These infamous visitors from the Sun could disrupt our telecommunications, GPSs, power grids, satellite navigation and plane routes.
This could even ruin for you an outing for watching a good football match with your friends.
Astronomers and Astrophysicists estimated that the storm which was triggered by a two large and unique Solar Flares earlier this week will bombard our magnetic field of Planet Earth during Thursday.
The chemical activity of our star “the Sun” rises and falls through an 11-year cycle called the Solar Cycle. The cycle releases several other solar phenomena and features such as: Solar Flares, Solar Prominences, Sunspots, Coronal mass Ejection, Solar winds and charged storms in addition to many other features of the Sun.
The cycle is due to peak in 2013.
According to Doug Biesiecker from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: “The flares result in what is known as coronal mass ejections, a technical term for what is really a big ball of gas travelling at 2,000 kilometres per second.”
“The incoming gas of charged particles could affect satellites and will launch a geomagnetic storm in the Earth’s protective magnetic field,” said Beisiecker to the BBC.
Surprisingly, although the problems which the Solar Storms could cause to us, this stealth storms cause the beautiful astronomical phenomena known publicly as the “Northern Lights” which is predicted to be visible at lower latitudes during today and the coming days.
Scientifically, the phenomena of sky lights are known as “Aurora Borealis” in the North Pole and “Aurora Australis” in the Southern Pole. Both phenomena are identically the same; they only have different names derived from their locations, nothing more.. nothing less.
The aurora becomes observed at lower latitudes when the Solar Storms get strong, on the other hand, aurora gets only witnessed in the two Poles when the solar activity and thus its storms are weak and calm.