Wednesday January 19, 2005
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Wednesday January 19, 2005 | Solar Flares Hits Today | Life |
OK, so not the flare, but the effects hit today.
Taken from space.com:
A huge sunspot kicked up a powerful flare Monday that could spark colorful sky lights above Earth Tuesday night or early Wednesday.
The flare was classified as X-3. All X-class flares are considered major, with the number indicated a degree of severity. Its radiation traveled at light-speed, arriving at Earth within minutes and, along the way, swamping a detector on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, which monitors the Sun and its storms.
Along with the flare came a billowing cloud of charge particles known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). Traveling at millions of miles per hour, CMEs take anywhere from about 17 hours to two or three days to reach Earth.
Scientists expect this CME to arrive overnight Tuesday or sometime Wednesday.
The CME is likely to trigger the Northern Lights, also known as aurora. These waves and wisps of red, yellow and green are created when charged particles excite molecules in the upper atmosphere, causing them to glow.
People at high latitudes, including northern Europe
and the northernmost United States, are likely to have
a chance of spotting aurora, as they have on recent
nights during an ongoing period of heightened solar
activity.
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January 19, 2005 09:15 AM PST
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Kevin Chu, Some Rights Reserved.
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