REVISED
FORECAST: The CME launched toward
Earth by yesterday's X-flare is moving faster than
originally thought. Analysts at the Goddard Space
Weather Lab have revised their forecast accordingly,
advancing the cloud's expected arrival time to 09:17
UT (5:17 am EDT) on Saturday, July 14th. Weekend
auroras are likely.
Aurora alerts: text,
voice.
X-FLARE!
Big sunspot AR1520 unleashed an
X1.4-class solar flare on July 12th. Because the
sunspot is directly facing Earth, everything about
the blast was geoeffective. For one thing, it hurled
a coronal mass ejection (CME) directly toward our
planet. According to a forecast
track prepared by analysts at the Goddard Space
Weather Lab, the CME will hit Earth on July 14th
around 09:17 UT (+/- 7 hours) and could spark strong
geomagnetic storms.
The explosion also strobed Earth with
a pulse of extreme UV radiation, shown here in a
movie recorded by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:
The UV pulse partially ionized Earth's
upper atmosphere, disturbing the normal propagation
of radio signals around the planet. Monitoring stations
in Norway,
Ireland and Italy
recorded the sudden ionospheric disturbance.
Finally, solar protons accelerated
by the blast are swarming around Earth. The radiation
storm, in
progress, ranks "S1" on NOAA space
weather scales, which means it poses no serious
threat to satellites or astronauts. This could change
if the storm continues to intensify. Stay tuned.
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