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Close Second Solar Storm for |
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Friday, October 31, 2003
A second huge magnetic solar storm arrived at Earth yesterday, just a day after an earlier one hit the planet in what one astronomer called an unprecedented one-two punch.
It's like the Earth is looking right down the barrel of a giant gun pointed at us by the sun . . . and it's taken two big shots at us, said John L. Kohl of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
Kohl, the principal investigator for an instrument aboard NASA's sun-watching SOHO spacecraft, said the probability of two huge flares aimed directly at Earth coming so close together, as they have this week, is unprecedented . . . so low that it is a statistical anomaly.
He said the second solar storm, known as a coronal mass ejection, peeled off the sun about 4 p.m. Wednesday. Charged particles from the ejection started arriving at Earth about 10 a.m. yesterday.
This was just a day after an earlier ejection was first detected on Earth, arriving about 1 a.m. Wednesday.
The second blast from the sun was moving even faster than the first one did, and some particles from the first lingered even as the second onslaught continued, Kohl said. Two other solar eruptions hit a glancing blow at Earth last weekend.
While such solar storms do not directly endanger humans, the charged particles can play havoc with electric grids, satellites and other equipment. They can also create spectacular displays of the northern and southern lights.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which runs the U.S. early warning center for such solar events, said that Wednesday's storm produced a report of northern lights being seen as far south as El Paso.
The X-ray and solar radiation storms rank as the second-largest such events recorded in the latest 11-year cycle, according to NOAA data. Records of solar cycles date from 1755. This is the end of the 23rd cycle.
Wednesday's geomagnetic particle storm measured G5, or extreme, making it one of the three or four strongest such storms in the latest 11-year cycle. By contrast, Kohl said, the storm that hit yesterday was a K8, still substantial but not as intense as the previous one.
WPTech
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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