The Sun is up to all sorts of interesting things this week, with unusually high sunspot activity leading to a series of solar flares (or coronal mass ejections, CMEs, in the jargon). One was launched on Sunday night and arrived here only 34 hours later, a good deal faster than the usual average of 2-3 days. That led to some pretty stunning aurora borealis activity; the shot below was taken in Tromsø in Norway (h/t Bjørn Jørgensen, via the excellent SpaceWeather.com).
As it turns out, though, Sunday’s solar flare was just a warm-up. Another even larger one – scoring 9 on a strength scale that runs to 10 – set off towards us at about 4am GMT yesterday, which means it will be arriving in about 4 hours’ time (2pm GMT on 24 January). The image below is from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory; see also this movie from SOHO, NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.
Does this mean we’re in for a Carrington Event? Doesn’t look like it – 95% of the CME is going to miss us, so we’ll only catch the edge. Had it hit us square on, we’d be looking at very substantial disruption to internet, GPS and telecoms. But if you live in a northern latitude and you have a clear evening, then certainly worth keeping an eye on the sky – could be pretty spectacular.
