The solar storm heading towards Earth after giant hole appears in Sun
There is a hole in the sun and it is a massive one. This is the second ‘coronal hole’ to appear in a week, and it will be unleashing solar winds at 1.8-million-mile-per-hour solar towards Earth. It will reportedly impact Earth on Friday.
When the high-speed solar winds come near to the Earth, they impact the planet’s magnetic fields and cause disturbance in the magnetosphere, which is a protective layer around Earth to save it from harmful solar storms. The upcoming solar storms can also cause significant disruptions to earth’s technology and their sources help create a link with space, such as satellites, space shuttles, etc. Such disruptions can be clearly seen on Earth if the solar storm is strong enough.
The northern lights or aurora, are the most obvious consequence. Aurora display happens when charged particles from the Sun are released into the Earth’s atmosphere and impact with air molecules high above the ground.These storms hit a climax known as the solar maximum in the centre of the cycle. The action then changes again, and the Sun becomes more peaceful and calmer until the cycle is complete.
The sunspots that show on the Sun’s surface are used to calculate solar energy. Scientists are currently monitoring the situation to see if the winds will impact Earth’s magnetic field, satellites and technology, as per reports. This was the Sun’s seventh such eruption in just three months in 2023. It equals the entire number of eruptions produced by the Sun in 2022. This incident represents the Sun’s rapid increase in activity as it moves closer to peak activity in its solar cycle.
“The current coronal hole, the big one right now, is about 300,000 to 400,000 kilometers across,” Alex Young from NASA Goddard’s Heliophysics Science Division told Insider.
