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On August 1st, almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in a tumult of activity. There was a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami, multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection (CME) and more, headed toward Earth. CMEs are large clouds of charged particles that are ejected from the sun over the course of several hours and can carry up to ten billion tons of plasma. The CME impacted Earth's magnetic field on August 3rd, causing a G2-class geomagnetic storm, producing aurorae. The aurorae were visible for a few days, across Europe, North America, Australia and Russia. At the height of the display, Northern Lights descended as far south as Wisconsin and Iowa in the United States. Stronger solar storms in the future could cause adverse impacts to space-based assets and technological infrastructure on Earth.

The sun goes through a regular activity cycle about 11 years long. The last solar maximum occurred in 2001 and its recent extreme solar minimum was particularly weak and long lasting. However, these more recent kinds of eruptions are one of the first signs that the sun is waking up and heading toward another solar maximum expected in the 2013 time frame. This is one of the fastest CMEs in years, and was captured by NASAs STEREO COR1 telescopes.

For more information on solar storms, visit the NASA website, or read up on the science behind space weather using resources from the National STEM Centre’s eLibrary.