Just in time for Halloween, massive flares from the Sun left many parts of the world lit up, and many parts witnessed a northern lights-like effect in the sky, leaning into the eerie feel of the spooky festival. As per NASA, this happened due to a geomagnetic storm that hit the giant star.
“Brighter than a shimmering ghost, faster than the flick of a black cat’s tail, the Sun cast a spell in our direction, just in time for Halloween,” NASA stated in the video uploaded by the agency, showing the vivid eruptions and colour portrayed by the Sun during the course of the geomagnetic storm.
A G3 class geomagnetic storm hit the Sun and then triggered an aurora effect in the skies in lower altitudes, where it is quite unusual. Northern lights or auroras are usually seen in the north pole, and thus, many were left taken by surprise due to the phenomena.
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NASA has released video footage of the G3 geomagnetic storm hitting the Sun which shows a series of small flares and petal-like eruptions of solar material in the last week of October, which most likely drove the northern lights away from the poles and into lower altitude skies.
The giant flare of the Sun arrived on the Earth about 48 hours later and was classified as an X1 Class flare. This was the second X class flare that was caused in the current solar cycle, which began in December 2019. A new solar cycle begins after every 11 years, approximately.
NASA, in a blog post, said, “Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.”
Two other eruptions blew off the Sun from this active region: an eruption of solar material called a coronal mass ejection and an invisible swarm of solar energetic particles. These are high-energy charged particles accelerated by solar eruptions, NASA wrote in its blog post.
