This month’s increase in auroras may have been even more remarkable than we thought.
This shows the aurora borealis stunned observers around the world two weekends ago, including people from as far south as Florida in the US and Ladakh in northern India, may have been among the strongest such light shows since record-keeping began.
“With news of Aurora Visible as low as 26 degrees magnetic latitude, this recent storm may rival some of the lowest aurora sightings recorded in the last five centuries, although scientists are still evaluating that assessment,” NASA officials said. declaration.
“It’s kind of hard to measure storms over time because our technology is constantly changing,” Delores Knipp, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who focuses on space weather, added in the same statement. “Aurora visibility is not a perfect measure, but it allows us to make comparisons over the centuries.”
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The northern and southern lights are usually a spectacle only in high latitude areas such as the Arctic and northern Canada. But the vibrant colors migrated equatorward on May 10 due to a rare G5 geomagnetic storm unleashed by our hyperactive sun a few days ago, the strongest to hit our planet since then. Halloween 2003.
Between May 3 and 9 NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory cataloged 82 “notable” solar flare friction from two active regions on the Sun (3363 and 3364). These sunspot clusters were so complex that they erupted repeatedly throughout the week. Starting May 7, at least seven coronal mass ejectionsor CMES, headed towards Earth and began attacking our planet on May 10, when the strongest auroras were observed.
“All of the CMEs arrived largely at once, and the conditions were right to create a truly historic storm,” Elizabeth MacDonald, a space physicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement.
This storm was so intense that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which predicts solar storms and their impact on our planet, issued storm warning for the first time in nearly two decades. The warning prompted NASA to put at least one of its satellites, ICESat-2, into safe mode as a precaution. Some instruments aboard other missions were also shut down, the space agency noted in a statement.
To better understand the full scope of the event, scientists are also studying reports submitted by citizen scientists as part of a NASA-funded effort known as Aurorasaurus, which tracks the aurora borealis around the world. Aurora-related tweets and messages are aggregated into a map and verified with the help of citizen scientists, according to the site. Each verified report then becomes a data point for scientists to study and possibly incorporate into it space weather models.
“We’ll be studying this event for years,” said Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla, acting director of NASA’s Lunar-Mars Weather Analysis Office. “It will help us test the limits of our models and understanding of solar storms.”
The sunspot cluster that ignited the historic dazzling display of lights has been spun out of our view by the sun’s rotation. However, scientists say it is now coming within sight of Mars, which has already begun to testify the effects of the strongest eruption yet, AR3664, which was fired last Tuesday (May 14), scientists say.
“We’re already starting to capture some data on Mars, so this story just continues,” said Jamie Favors, director of NASA’s Space Weather Program in Washington.