On Wednesday, March 7, a massive sunspot unleashed a solar flare in the general direction of Earth.
After a day of travel, the flare hit the Earth on Thursday, and will continue Friday, pelting the planet with waves of X-ray and UV rays and hyper-charged electrons moving at over 800 kilometers per second.
On Thursday, March 8th, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, declared a 40% chance that an even larger solar flare will be fired at us, the sunspot from which it’s expected to erupt being aligned almost directly with Earth.
Sunspots and solar flares are all a part of the sun’s natural cycle, which scientists have mapped to be roughly eleven years long, says DVC astronomy professor Karen Castle, although it may be just a part of a much larger, and not yet fully understood cycle nearly a century in length.
Concerned readers should know that the larger flare, and the subsequent wash of hyper-charged electrons, X-rays and UV rays, will not cause any damage to people on the ground.
The majority of the particles are being dragged to the Earth’s magnetic poles, where they will hit against one another and release energy, creating the Aurora Borealis in the north and the Aurora Australis in the south and that the part of the magnetic field redirecting the particles is between the Earth and the Moon, but far above our satellites and space stations.
This particular blast has generated beautiful bright green auroras. The X and UV rays are dissipated by the atmosphere.
