***UPDATE: the X9 has finally arrived (Monday afternoon and evening) and is triggering auroras (briefly) as far south as Cape Cod in Florida. Keep your eyes out….
By Jo Nova
Two X-class flares in two days, X7.1 and now X9
I put in an order for an x class flare while I’m away from city lights. I was delighted when a big X7.1 was launched on cue a couple of days ago. It was the second biggest flare this cycle until a few minutes ago when a huge X9.05 occurred. This is now the largest solar flare in Cycle 25, bigger than the flare in May this year which caused all the auroras around the world this year in places like Florida and southern Queensland. That was an X8.7.
The X7.1 flare may bring auroras Friday or Saturday which was exciting enough. The scale is logarithmic, so this latest one is effectively 100 times larger.
Few details are available yet on the latest flare. The same sunspot (AR 3842) caused both x-class flares this week, and it is near the centre of the side facing us.
It does appear to be Earth directed, but as with all things aurora — we won’t know for sure until it happens (or it doesn’t). Space agencies will make guesses about when these will arrive but they may turn up 8 hours early or late, and the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field needs to be “negative” for good auroras.
People who want to see an aurora are best signing up for an email or SMS notification (EG Glendale App). We won’t know exactly when the best action will be until the charged particles from the Coronal Mass Ejection hit the satellites at the Lagrange point. These sit about a million miles away from Earth. When (if) that happens, aurora-hunters will have only 30 minutes to an hour to get to a dark spot.
And of course, the best laid plans may be wrecked by clouds or dawn.
Woah! What a flare! In addition to the X7 #SolarFlare from earlier this week, the same region on the Sun just produced an X9 flare, the *largest* solar flare we’ve seen since 2017! We await further data to determine if it produced an eruption. #spaceweather #astronomy pic.twitter.com/FVKpamTBTW
— Dr. Ryan French (@RyanJFrench) October 3, 2024
Charged particles can take anywhere from 15 hours to 4 days to arrive at Earth. Here’s hoping…
RESOURCES
- Check the Glendale App –sign up, and read the useful help pop-ups.
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC)
- Sign up for email alerts from the Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre for aurora
- Check data at SpaceWeatherLive or sign up for alerts at SpaceWeatherLive.
- Some bright spark set up Aurorasaurus to track aurora related tweets. Apparently they correlate quite well with geomagnetic indices. If only people were tweeting 150 years ago.
- The image from Nullschool is fast but only loosely indicative on a 3 hourly guesstimate not a minute-by-minute thing (and it usually underestimates the odds).
UPDATE: The AuroraGuy has a good description here.
Find a place with a dark sky to watch from. He suggests the Bortle Scale 1-5 which are country or rural sites. The darkest sites are class 1 and the brightest city is class 9.
People who want to see an aurora are best signing up for an email or SMS notification (EG Glendale App). We won’t know exactly when the best action will be until the charged particles from the Coronal Mass Ejection hit the satellites at the LaGrange point. These sit about a million miles away from Earth. When (if) that happens, aurora-hunters will have only 30 minutes to an hour to get to a dark spot.
Nice pretty colours in the sky and all that but what about the negative impact on communications etc from all those charged particles bombarding Planet Earth?
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Most excellent – strange lights in the sky – there may be more than simple pagers or walkie-talkies going ‘pop!’ and ‘bang!’. If Jo’s site goes blank, it’s been a pleasure chatting with such inquisitive and polite folk from around the planet. Now where’s my popcorn…
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More rain coming.
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“A solar flare is a sudden burst of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun’s atmosphere, essentially a flash of light, while a coronal mass ejection (CME) is a large cloud of charged particles and magnetic field that is ejected from the Sun’s corona, essentially a massive burst of plasma traveling through space; while they can sometimes occur together, a flare is primarily radiation while a CME is a physical mass of material ejected from the Sun”.
I think the CME was not overwhelming
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https://spaceweather.com/images2024/03oct24/halocme2.gif
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Impressive!
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Wow, cosmic man.
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Very close temporally.
let’s hope the 7.1 ejecta doesn’t clear an easier path for the following 9’s or that the 9’s doesn’t catch up and add to the 7.1’s.
we don’t need any massive communication disruptions and confusion with the planet in such dangerous disorder
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I will be in Tromso in the Artic Circle in 12 weeks time. I sure hope there will be plenty of activity then!
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I used to travel to Tromso and environs on business in the past. Always a spectacular show most nights in midwinter. You’re sure to see horizon to horizon fireworks.
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Bz is negative, so more favourable to ionospheric disturbance and auroras.
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When solar plasma storms reach here,
They meet the Earth’s magnetosphere,
Confronting our defensive shield,
From poles of the magnetic field,
Auroras north and south appear.
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Better charge your ev and stock up on diversity and DEI just in case. 😆
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For those who don’t know, there’s a more data packed site at spaceweathernews.com
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Could be a good idea to unplug your personal computers and laptops and anything charging until these CMEs are over. Geoff S
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Geoff, we are near a solar max. There will be more CME’s in the next year. An X9 is big but not a Carrington type event. The radio blackout from the solar flare has already happened. The CME arriving will hopefully cause a light show (or maybe not). May be a nothingburger.
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Are we doomed again?
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It appears we in Australia may miss this one. I’ve added a few links to the post in an update, but the sun is arriving soon, and the X9 CME is due in the next few hours. (Though no one really knows, and “next few hours” could mean 12 hours from now.)
See the update on the posts for these active links to the AuroraGuy and the dark sky index.
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So the X7 was a fizzer and people are now waiting for the X9 impact but no one knows if that will go pfft too.
Discussions on the SpaceWeatherLive forum have run to 600+ comments, but there is no confirmation that the X9 impact has hit or missed Earth yet. “In the next few hours maybe” say some hopefuls.
https://community.spaceweatherlive.com/topic/3529-ar13842-20241001-03-cmes/page/28/
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As one commenter calculated — if it is only travelling at 332km/sec, which is about as slow as these things can go) it will take 5 days and 18 hours to get here. So it’s still on the way.
Pleroma says:
So that’s not arriving (maybe) until Oct 9th 7am London time. (Which is 5pm Sydney time, and 3pm Perth time).
But no one really knows how fast these things are until they hit the satellites.
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