US issues solar storm warning after huge sun explosion; Know what this means

periodically, sun expels massive explosions of particles in Solar system. Sometimes, when solar flares target Earth exactly, particles can form twilight Bright in the night sky in many parts of the planet. There are other occasions when bombing can damage satellites, distort GPS signals, and disrupt power grids.

On Wednesday, the ninth of this month, a federal center in the United States issued a severe solar storm warning after a sun-monitoring spacecraft detected a large solar flare emanating from a sunspot in the northern hemisphere, accompanied by an explosion of particles known as a mass solar emission.

“The troubling thing here is that it was right at the center of the sun,” Sean Dahl, service coordinator at the Space Weather Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said at a news conference.

If the flare was located directly at the center of the Sun, then at least part of it was aimed directly at Earth. This bombardment could make the northern lights and southern lights visible on the night of Thursday the 10th, bringing it much closer to the equator than usual.

This was the second time the center had issued such a warning, which is the space weather equivalent of a tornado warning, in the past 19 years.

The forecast will remain largely a guess until the particle waves pass by two spacecraft, NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer, or ACE, and the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR.

Both are located about a million miles from Earth, providing 15 to 30 minutes of warning before solar storms reach Earth. At this point, the alert can be upgraded to a warning.

In May, the center began talking with power grid operators about six hours before the storm hit.

This time, they reached out early because the power grid, already damaged by Hurricane Helen last month, would be damaged even more as Hurricane Milton approached Florida.

“With all the hurricane relief efforts underway and the incoming hurricane heading toward Florida and across the peninsula, we felt it was prudent to contact them immediately,” Dahl said. “We don’t know the real situation there, but that’s what worries us.”

Neither May nor this week’s eruption is considered as serious as the Carrington event that struck Earth in 1859, knocking out telegraph stations, or another event in 1989 that caused a nine-hour blackout in Quebec.

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