[Fourlanders] Gigantic Sunspot Unleashes Flare; Expect Aurora Tonight!

[whensley11 at comcast.net]

>From QRZ.com: 





Right now, the Sun is sporting a huge sunspot called AR1944. It’s grown in size over the past few days to a staggering 200,000 kilometers (125,000 miles) across. 

Sunspots are regions of intense magnetism, and these magnetic fields store huge energies. They can be unleashed in vast explosions called solar flares … and AR1944 popped off a good one on Jan. 7. The image above shows the Sun in ultraviolet by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, taken on Jan. 7 at 18:33 UTC, just after the flare exploded. The bright white patch? Yeah, that’s it. 

It also triggered a coronal mass ejection, an eruption of subatomic particles, toward the Earth. There’s no need to panic; these happen relatively often. This one was pretty fast, with a speed of about 2,000 kilometers per second—that’s 4.5 million miles per hour! 

It’s expected to hit the Earth’s magnetic field sometime today or tonight. The Space Weather Prediction Center says it may interact strongly with our geomagnetic field, producing aurorae. I’ve seen some folks predicting even mid-latitudes may see the lights, so I urge folks to go out after dark and look north. Unfortunately the Moon is half-full and so the sky will be a bit bright. It sets just after midnight local time, so if you go out later your chances of seeing the aurora might be better. It looks like we’ll have clear skies here in Boulder, Colo., so I’ll be taking a peek. Aurorae may still be visible Thursday night as well. 

 
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