Earth may be in line of fire for strong solar ejection Sunday
August 8, 2010
Sunspot 1093, August 7, 2010 (Mike Borman)
Active sunspot region 1093 of the Sun is now rotating toward Earth. By the end of this weekend, we’ll be in the line of fire for a possible coronal mass ejection if the sunspot’s magnetic fields become unstable again, according to a Spaceweather.com alert just received by KurzweilAI.
On August 7th (1825 UT), magnetic fields around sunspot 1093 became unstable and erupted, producing a strong M1-class solar flare. The eruption hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space, just missing a direct sun-Earth line. Forecasters expect the cloud to deliver no more than a glancing blow to our planet’s magnetic field when it billows by on August 9th or 10th — not be a major space weather event.
A major solar storm could cause 20 times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina, warned the National Academy of Sciences in a 2008 report, “Severe Space Weather Events—Societal and Economic Impacts.” Smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services, and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity.
“The flare produced intense radio bursts detectable by ordinary shortwave receivers on Earth, reports Spaceweather.com. “In New Mexico, amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft picked up strong emissions around 21 MHz. ‘Listen to some of the sounds than came out of the loudspeakers,’ he says. ‘This was a complex flare and very exciting. Yet it is still small stuff compared to what is coming in the future as Solar Cycle 24 intensifies.'”
