Most Powerful Magnetic Storm in over 3 years

This time we got lucky. This is the message that comes from NASA on the heaviest impact of magnetic storm on our planet caused by the sun. In over 3 years we have not seen such an intensification of solar activity causing this big of a magnetic storm on Earth. It was in December 2006 that scientists last registered a storm of this magnitude.

On 3 April, the SOHO spacecraft spotted a cloud of charged particles called a coronal mass ejection (CME) shooting from the sun at 500 kilometres per second. This velocity suggested the front would reach Earth in roughly three days.

Doug Biesecker of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado said “It hit earlier and harder than forecast,”. However our power grid system, which is expected to major failures worldwide the moment an even bigger storm reaches us, this time survived. However it did trigger dazzling auroras in places like Iceland.

Furthermore Biesecker says “Such storms highlight the uncertainty in the arrival times of CMEs, which can easily be 15 hours off predictions. Better modeling of the solar wind, which can accelerate CMEs en route to Earth, could reduce the uncertainty”.

It is generally expected that these types of sunburst causing these magnetic storms will increase over the next months and years, and some scientists and researchers believe that this will be the cause of the start of the announced disasters in 2012.

Source: http://blog.2012pro.com/