06/09/11 Solar Flare Ejected Towards Earth

On Tuesday, a big solar storm happened, and lasted just about 3 hours. There was a large solar flare, considered only a moderate level event, also known as Class M. However, the issue is more with the CME (coronal mass ejection) that was shot off from the sun's surface. Having a CME shoot material out into space (sometimes in the direction of earth) is not all that unusual. What makes this particular instance unique is that a majority of the CME's cloud of charged particles that erupted, fell back down to the surface of the sun.

"The particles that were shot off expanded to a very large volume, sort of a mushroom cloud, and then a lot fell back down to the sun," Chamberlin said.

The upside for many skywatchers is that there was still enough material sent toward Earth to display some extra-bright displays of auroras (northern lights) late week.

Unfortunately,  scientists say that some of the particles from the flare that hit Earth could possibly cause problems for satellites and power grids on Thursday and Friday. Quite often, solar flares cause power outages, satellite and grid failures. Despite the fact that this was a rather large flare, it won't cause drastic impacts due to where it happened on the sun.

"If it's pointing towards earth we've got a real serious problem with power outages and communication breakdown. Fortunately, this one shot off a limb of the sun and it's going to miss planet earth," said David Ritchey, the associate director of the St. Louis Science Center.

The Space Weather Prediction Center said  that the wait for the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) continues. The timing of this event when it hits earth is still a bit uncertain since we will not take a direct hit.  Look for G1 (minor) Geomagnetic Storm conditions from around 7am June 9th through June 10. The possibility remains for heightened Radiation Storm levels with the passage of the CME shock, but nothing greater than S2 (moderate) is forecast.

"We're seeing things we've never seen before," said Phillip Chamberlin, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It's a really exciting event. There are a lot of exceptions to it."

If you are curious about the active regions on the sun you can click on this link to view the current active locations, like the picture below.