STATE & NATIONAL: This weekend portions of the United States will see the beauty of the colors that grace the skies, as a matter of routine, in Colorado. It’s called tge Aurora Borealis and is the presence of an array of beautiful colors in the night skies.
By Anne M Erbynstein.
The X2.9 flare, otherwise referred to scientifically as tge AR3664, is set on a course to make its return across the nation to the northern between May 31 thought June 1st— this weekend!
The sunspot responsible for the spectacular auroras seen across the globe earlier this month is about to face toward Earth again. The sunspot, known as AR3664, was an enormous region on the sun’s surface, approximately 15 times as wide as Earth. On May 10, 2024, it fired off a series of coronal mass ejections (CMEs)—bursts of radiation and solar plasma—into our planet’s magnetic field.
The events erupting in the series of coronal mass injections interaction triggered the northern lights (aurora borealis) to be visible across all 50 U.S. states and beyond, resulting in the most powerful geomagnetic storm in decades.
Sunspots are regions with reduced surface temperature caused by concentrations of magnetic field activity on the sun’s surface. As the sun rotates, this sunspot group typically lasts a long time, and AR3664 is now returning to a central position where it can once again affect Earth.
It takes about a month for the sunspot to complete its rotation, so we can expect to see it again in a couple of weeks. When charged particles from CMEs reach Earth, they interact with our planet’s magnetosphere, causing geomagnetic storms. The May 10 storm was classified as a G5 geomagnetic storm, the most powerful category, and it was the first of its kind since 2003.
It has been the repeat of these rare event that have produced stunning displays of color in the skies across the Northern Hemisphere, including the United States.
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