Massive solar flare could activate aurora for Northern US and Europe: report

19 July 2023

People living in the mid and upper Atlantic regions may get a rare treat on Wednesday night due to a solar storm on Monday, The Washington Post's Kasha Patel reports.

"The incoming bursts of energy caused a radio blackout and are expected to bring aurora Wednesday night into Thursday across the northern reaches of the United States and Europe," Patel explains. "The activity is just a preview of what’s to come as the solar activity ramps up in upcoming years."

Patel writes based on expert testimony that "auroras could appear down to the mid-latitudes. For a moderate geomagnetic storm, the dancing lights could be seen in the Northeast, northern and central Great Plains, and northern Rockies. If the geomagnetic storm ends up on the stronger side of predictions, the curtains of light could appear further south."

Eruptions of charged particles from the Sun, known as coronal mass ejections, have a history of disrupting communications and other electronic equipment on Earth when they strike the magnetosphere. The most significant occurrence — The Carrington Event — was in 1859, when solar plasma caused telegraphs across the world to go on the fritz.

Amateur astronomer Richard Carrington observed a huge flash on the Sun while studying sunspots, and was the first to posit a correlation between solar activity and terrestrial technology. Other CMEs over the next century led to similar incidents, including the infamous 1989 blackout in Quebec, Canada that was triggered by the billion-tons of solar material hurled at the planet.

But unlike those episodes, Patel stresses, Monday's flare lasted a staggering eight hours.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center Program Coordinator Bill Murtagh remarked to Patel that "what really made it interesting is how long that went on," adding that "a big prolonged event like that is indicative of the total energy of the eruption."

Watch the footage of the explosion below via SpaceWeatherLive, which noted that "the M5.7 solar flare from AR3363 was highly eruptive and caused the first moderate S2 solar radiation storm of SC25. The resulting CME is impressive but we think the probability of it arriving at Earth is low due to the partial halo outline and location of the eruption."

Patel's full article continues here (subscription required).