NY: A space weather storm picked up pace this week forcing several airlines to reroute and creating nighttime light shows in Australia, America and the Northern Lights.
The geomagnetic event started on Tuesday with a series of explosions that send particles whizzing towards Earth but the storm was not initially as severe as experts had predicted.
However, it's ferocity increased when the sun fired off another solar flare on Thursday night, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center alerted.
Space weather scientists use five categories — A, B, C, M and X — to rank solar flares based on their strength and severity.
A-class flares are the weakest types of sun storms, while X-class eruptions are the most powerful.
Tuesday’s eruptions were rated as X-class solar flares and, after a slow start, triggered the strongest solar storm in eight years, according to Bob Rutledge, head of NOAA's Space Weather Forecast Office.
The sun’s latest explosion, which came from the same sunspot region, measured M-class on the scale - the second most severe type of solar flare.
'When you take overall intensity and length - how long it persisted - we're confident in saying by some measures, it was the strongest storm we've seen since November 2004,' Rutledge told Msbcn.com.
People across Wisconsin, Michigan and Washington witnessed the nighttime light show caused by the aurora borealis, which is when highly charged particles interact with the Earth's magnetic field, creating a colorful glow.
Solar storms can bring additional radiation around the north and south poles - a risk that sometimes forces airlines to reroute flights, which happened in this instance.
On Thursday, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines sent 11 flights to Asia on a more southern route rather than their more common path over the Arctic. Three American Airlines flights flew lower than normal over the northernmost parts of their routes to Japan and China.
Scientists say such storms don't pose a threat to people, just technology.
The space weather center's website says a storm rated as strong could force corrections to voltage systems and trigger false alarms on some protection devices, as well as increase drag on satellites and affect their orientation.
WHAT ARE SOLAR STORMS - AND HOW CAN THEY AFFECT US?A solar radiation storm is a blast of radiation from the Sun towards the Earth, made up of protons and other charged particles.
The radiation is blocked by the magnetosphere and atmosphere, so cannot reach humans on Earth. Such a storm could, however, harm humans traveling from Earth to the Moon or Mars, though it has little to no effect on aeroplane passengers or astronauts within Earth’s magnetosphere.
Solar radiation storms can also disturb the regions through which high frequency radio communications travel.
Therefore, during a solar radiation storm, planes traveling routes near the poles - which cannot use GPS, but rely exclusively on radio communications - may be re-routed.
The solar storm sent a huge wave of radiation into earth's atmosphere creating a brilliant show of the aurora borealis near Yellowknife, Australia
