Solar storms that caused pretty auroras can create havoc with technology — here’s how

By Jim Wild, Lancaster University

At the weekend, millions of people around the world were treated to a mesmerising display of the aurora borealis and aurora australis, better known as the northern and southern lights. The lights, usually seen in crown-like regions surrounding the Earth’s poles, were pushed to mid-latitudes by heightened activity from the Sun.

The same geomagnetic storms causing the auroras can cause havoc with our planet’s human-made infrastructure. These storms, caused by high energy particles from the Sun hitting our atmosphere, have the potential to knock out electrical grids and satellites. So what were the impacts of this recent burst of stormy space weather?

Around May 8, an active region of the Sun exploded, flinging a billion-tonne cloud of magnetised and electrically charged material known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) towards the Earth. This turned out to be the first of several successive CMEs, which later merged to form a single, massive structure.

This crashed into our planet’s magnetosphere, the region of space near Earth that is dominated by the terrestrial magnetic field. As sub-atomic particles from the CME are funnelled downward, channels of electrical current flowing through part of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere, are intensified.

Apart from triggering the auroral displays, this can cause powerful magnetic fluctuations at the Earth’s surface. As a result, electrical currents can flow through power grids, pipelines and railway lines, potentially interfering with normal operations.

The sub-atomic particles from the CME can cause damage to the solar panels and electronics of satellites. On Saturday, Elon Musk said that his company SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites were “under a lot of pressure,” because of the storm, “but holding up so far”.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1789173902289338518?t=EW6W8DKaZ_iPlJcvl5HpuQ&s=19

The disturbances in the ionosphere were compounded by a series of bright eruptions called “flares” on the Sun that poured high energy radiation across the Earth’s sunlit face.

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