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Scientists surprised as geomagnetic storm opened ‘cracks’ in Earth’s magnetosphere | Science & Technology News



A geomagnetic storm hit our planet over the weekend, surprising scientists because it doesn’t appear to have originated from a solar flare.

The storm came amid a rare alignment of the five planets, giving photographers the chance to photograph them against a backdrop of brilliant auroras.

Astronomers now believe the storm was the result of a much rarer phenomenon than solar flares — something called the co-rotating interacting region (CIR) caused by two solar winds meeting.

CIRs are created when solar winds at different speeds interact, carrying an enormous shock and accumulating plasma at an extraordinary speed – 700 km/s in this case – and there is no sign of it. sunspot detection.

With no sunspot signaling a coronal mass ejection, scientists have no signal that a geomagnetic storm is on its way.

As it hit Earth, the storm managed to “open a crack in our planet’s magnetosphere,” according to Space Weather.

The solar storm comes a week after a massive sunspot – twice the size of our planet – pointed at Earth.

Although it has since turned away and the risk of dangerous CME has diminished, scientists do not know if it is connected to the CIR.

But even if we could predict hurricanes, the planet has limited defense against the most powerful forms of space weather, and our growing reliance on electronics makes them We are easily affected by their effects.

The Carrington Event is believed to be the largest solar storm ever recorded to hit Earth in 1859.

It left an aurora visible in the sky, even at latitudes much closer to the equator, and was described in contemporary reports as brighter than the light of a full moon.

It caused problems with telegraph systems across Europe and North America, and a similar storm today could cause trillions of dollars in damage globally.

Researchers believe that magnetic field radiation from giant solar storms caused sudden and almost instantaneous detonation among dozens of offshore mines in Vietnam in the 1970s.

Earlier this year SpaceX confirmed that a geomagnetic storm destroyed most of the Starlink satellites it attempted to enter orbit during one launch.

Solar activity has been observed to increase and decrease naturally every 11 years, although not quite like the hands of a clock, and astronomers believe we are entering period of increased solar activity may peak in 2025.

A new family of sunspots, discovered on the surface of our star in 2020, unleash the biggest solar flare that scientists have seen since 2017.



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