But if the particles arrive at Earth during the daytime, there won’t be a light show, experts said. Since the ejected particles are so far away, however, scientists aren’t able to predict the exact timing. “We expect it sometime today, so it’ll be a little bit over a 50-hour transit.” “This one is kind of on the fast side,” Mr. With Earth about 92 million miles away from the sun, the commute for the ejected particles is brief, sometimes as short as 15 hours or as long as four days, Dr. The large expulsion of plasma from the sun, called a coronal mass ejection, is traveling in space at about one million to six million miles an hour. It is not expected to cause technology disruptions, the center said.īut there are unknowns associated with any magnetic storm, especially the exact timing of its arrival. The storm was classified as a G3 on a scale from G1 to G5.
The prediction center issued a geomagnetic storm watch on Friday that said the storm may drive the aurora borealis, the scientific name for the northern lights, over Washington State, the upper Midwest and the Northeast on Saturday. Singer, chief scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center at the National Weather Service, said in an interview on Saturday. “If I was in the northern tier of the United States, then I would take a look in the sky,” Howard J. On Thursday morning, the rubber band snapped, and the pent-up energy was released as a solar flare, ejecting about a billion tons of plasma gas that could result in the dazzling display known as the northern lights once it reaches Earth this weekend.īut will it even be visible on Saturday night or early Sunday morning? Magnetic energy had been building up in the sun this week like a rubber band twisted into a corkscrew.
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