The Earth was exposed yesterday, Friday, to a ‘geomagnetic’ storm of the fifth level on a scale of 5 degrees, which means it is classified as ‘severe,’ for the first time since 2003.
The Emirates News Agency (WAM) quoted the US Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) as saying: ‘This storm is caused by the arrival of a series of coronal mass emissions from the Sun to Earth.’
This comes after astronomers reported, last April, a rare phenomenon, where four explosions occurred simultaneously on the surface of the sun.
The agency added that the emissions could cause a magnetic storm on Earth in the coming days.
The sources of the emissions were three sunspots and a magnetic filament “ring” of plasma, which exploded within minutes at a distance of hundreds of thousands of kilometers from each other, and their total strength was classified as M3.4.
Such events are called “sympathetic flares,” where pairs of sunspots flare at the same time, even if they are far apart.
Previously, scientists attributed this to me
re coincidence, but a study conducted in 2002 showed that sunspots are interconnected by magnetic rings in the solar corona, and when an explosion occurs in one of them, a chain reaction occurs in the other.
Scientists said that the flares that occurred on April 23 turned out to be a ‘complex quadrilateral’ that covered almost the entire area facing the Earth. Previously, similar events occurred in 2010, according to SpaceWeather portal reports.
Source: National Iraqi News Agency