This month’s increased auroras may have been even more remarkable than we thought.
The auroral shows that astonishes observers around the world two weekends ago, including people as far south as Florida in the US and Ladakh in northern India, this could have been one of the strongest light shows since record keeping began.
“With reports from auroras This recent storm is visible as far as magnetic latitude 26 degrees and could rival some of the lowest low-latitude auroral observations recorded in the past five centuries, although scientists are still assessing this ranking, NASA said officials a statement.
“It’s a bit difficult 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’s visibility is not the perfect benchmark, but it allows us to compare across centuries.”
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The Northern and Southern Lights are usually only visible in high latitude areas, such as the Arctic and northern Canada. But the vibrant colors migrated toward the equator on May 10 due to a rare G5 geomagnetic storm unleashed by our hyperactive Sun a few days earlier, the strongest to hit our planet since. Halloween of 2003.
Between May 3 and 9, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory cataloged 82 “remarkable” solar flares spawning from two active areas on the Sun (3663 and 3664). These clusters of sunspots became so complex that they erupted repeatedly throughout the week. At least seven from May 7 coronal mass ejectionsor CMES, barreled toward Earth and began battering our planet on May 10, when the strongest auroras were seen.
“The CMEs all arrived largely at the same time, and the conditions were just right to create a truly historic storm,” Elizabeth MacDonald, a space physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the 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 a report storm warning for the first time in almost twenty years. The warning prompted NASA to preemptively put at least one of its satellites, ICESat-2, into safe mode. Certain instruments aboard other missions were also disabled, the space agency noted in the statement.
To better understand the full scope of the event, scientists are also studying reports submitted by citizen scientists to the NASA-funded effort known as Aurorasaurus, which tracks auroras around the world. Aurora-related tweets and reports are compiled into a map and verified with the help of citizen scientists, according to the website. Each verified report then becomes a data point that scientists can study and potentially integrate space again models.
“We will be studying this event for years,” said Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla, acting director of NASA’s Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office. “It will help us test the limits of our models and our understanding of solar storms.”
The group of sunspots that caused the historically blinding light spectacle has disappeared from our view thanks to the rotation of the sun. However, scientists say it is now within sight of Mars, who has already started testifying the consequences of the strongest burst yet from AR3664, which was fired last Tuesday (May 14), scientists say.
“We’re already starting to capture some data on Mars, so this story is only going to continue,” said Jamie Favors, director of the NASA Space Weather Program in Washington.
Editor’s update 5/21: The two active regions on the Sun are sunspots 3663 and 3664. This article has been updated to reflect that.