This month’s enhanced auroras may have been even more remarkable than we thought.
The auroral shows this delighted observers around the world two weekends ago, including people 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 reports on aurora borealis visible down to 26 degrees magnetic latitude, this recent storm could rival some of the lowest-latitude aurora sightings recorded in the last five centuries, although scientists are still evaluating that ranking,” NASA officials said in declaration.
“It’s a little difficult to time storms 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 compare 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 bright colors migrated equatorward 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 2003.
Between May 3 and 9 NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory cataloged 82 “notables” solar flares spawning from two active regions of the sun (3363 and 3364). These groups of sunspots became so complex that they erupted multiple times during the week. As of May 7, at least seven coronal mass ejectionor CMES, headed toward Earth and began storming our planet on May 10, when the strongest auroras were observed.
“All of the CMEs arrived pretty much at once, and the conditions were right to create a truly historic storm,” Elizabeth McDonald, a space physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the statement.
This storm was so strong that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which predicts solar storms and their effects on our planet, issued storm warning for the first time in nearly two decades. The warning prompted NASA to preemptively put at least one of its satellites, ICESat-2, into safe mode. Some instruments aboard other missions were also turned off, the space agency noted in the statement.
To better understand the full scale of the event, scientists are also studying reports submitted by citizen scientists to the NASA-funded effort known as Aurorasaurus, which tracks the 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 for scientists to study and potentially incorporate space time models.
“We’ll be studying this event for years,” said Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla, acting director of NASA’s Moon-to-Mars Space Weather Analysis Office. “This will help us test the limits of our models and understanding of solar storms.”
The group of sunspots that caused the historic dazzling display of lights has spun out of our view thanks to the sun’s rotation. However, scientists say it is now coming into view of Mars, which has already begun to testify the impact of AR3664’s most powerful rocket yet, which was launched 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.
