Earth Hit By Twin Solar Storms, Effects Expected This Weekend

It has been predicted by the scientists that in the upcoming days the two huge explosions on the surface of the sun will cause a moderate to burly geomagnetic storm on Earth, perhaps upsetting radio and satellite communications.

During late Friday and early Saturday, the odd storm is not expected to cause chaos with personal electronics but may cause colorful nighttime auroras, or displays of the Northern Lights.

According to the views of Thomas Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Centre at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “We don’t expect any unmanageable impacts to national infrastructure from these solar events at this time but we are watching these events closely”. He further told that, “More pleasantly, we do expect these storm levels to cause significant auroras displays across much of the northern US on Friday night”.

The scientists claims that the storm begin with a slight solar blaze on Monday, followed by a major X-class blaze, the strongest classification on Wednesday at around 1745 GMT (1000 AEST).

Both flare-ups arrive from the same sunspot next to the centre of the solar disk, and both created momentous coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, of magnetized plasma shifted toward Earth.

Berger said if we see it on a one to five scale, the resulting geomagnetic storm should be “moderate to strong,” ranking a G2 or G3. He further reported that, “It is fairly rare for two CMEs of this magnitude to come in close succession like this”.

“Because of this we cannot rule out higher storm levels perhaps as high as G4 or severe geomagnetic storming, particularly in the Polar Regions.”

In order to get control over the expected situation, The National Weather Service has alarmed power grid operators and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The scientists had compared the strength of the storm pales to major geomagnetic storms of years past, like the 1859 Carrington event that eventually drained out power across a swath of Canada. This storm seem to be weaker than a near-miss geomagnetic storm in July 2012 that NASA scientists said could have knocked Earth’s technology back at least 150 years. That storm didn’t cause huge smash up as the fast-moving energized particles were not heading straight towards Earth.

William Murtagh, program coordinator at the Space Weather Prediction Centre said, “The events that just occurred over the last 24 hours were Earth-directed, they are just not that big”.

“If we had a very big storm and this is not it that produced big problems with the power grid that would be our biggest concern.”

Experts told the reporters that, there is no radiation caused by these flares presently enough to raise the concern for astronauts at the International Space Station. Although given the nature of CMEs with their internal magnetic fields, scientists are not yet sure accurately what will happen when they bounce off the Earth’s protective shield.

Murtagh explained, “The sun just shot out a magnet that is going to interact with another magnet, the Earth’s magnetic field and how they pair together is going to be critical in determining how intense the geomagnetic storm is going to be”.