The warning comes from meteorologists at the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who said Earth is about to pass through a high-speed stream of solar wind.
This phenomenon, as reported by Spaceweather.com, is the result of “gaseous material flowing from a hole in the Sun’s southern atmosphere.”
These “coronal holes”, which appear as dark areas in extreme ultraviolet and X-ray images, are regions where the Sun’s plasma is cooler and less dense than its surroundings thanks to the star’s magnetic field ‘lies in space like an open field.
According to NOAA, the geomagnetic storm that will result from Earth’s encounter with the solar wind stream will be relatively minor and will only be classified as a G1 event.
This is the smallest category on the five-point G scale used to classify geomagnetic storms.
As a G1 storm, tomorrow’s episode has the potential to have minor impacts on satellite operations and induce weak fluctuations in the power grid.
In contrast, the most powerful G5 events could severely affect satellite operations, cause power surges that destroy power grids and disrupt high-frequency radio communications for days on end.
Fortunately, G5 solar storms usually occur about four times every 11-year solar cycle.
The other likely result of tomorrow’s geomagnetic storm is the generation of auroras at lower latitudes than usual, and experts predict that these could be visible in both Maine and Michigan in the US.
Auroras are natural light shows that occur when particles in the solar wind excite atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere, causing them to glow.
Auroras form curtains of light that follow the lines of the geomagnetic field and appear in different colors depending on the atoms that are excited.
The two primary gases in the Earth’s atmosphere are oxygen, which emits a greenish light, and nitrogen, which appears in shades of blue, pink, and purple.
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The most powerful geomagnetic storm ever recorded occurred in September 1859, and is known as “the Carrington event”.
Rather than being the result of Earth passing through a high-speed solar wind stream, it was caused by a so-called coronal mass ejection.
They occur when the Sun burps up a cloud of charged particles and electromagnetic fluctuations.
The Carrington event affected the telegraph networks of Europe and North America, as well as the newly established transatlantic link that connected them.
Currents generated in the cables by the space weather event have reportedly caused telegraph pylons to spark, operators to receive electric shocks, and some lines to fail completely.
Meanwhile, other connections were found to still work even after the power had been cut, so strong were the electrical currents induced by the storm.
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According to a study presented at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGCOMM 2021 conference, a large solar storm like the Carrington event could have the potential to shut down the Internet for weeks.
Unlike Victorian-era telegraph lines, the fiber-optic cables that make up the Internet’s backbone are immune to electromagnetic fluctuations caused by solar storms.
The same cannot be said, however, for the signal amplifiers that are dotted along the submarine cables in order to maintain connections over long distances.
And being underwater, these long-distance cables are not only more vulnerable to the impacts of space weather, but also inherently more difficult to access for repair.
Astrophysicists predict that there is a 1.6-12 percent chance that a solar storm powerful enough to cause catastrophic disruption to modern society will hit Earth within the next 10 years.