Solar storm ATTENTION! Fast-moving solar winds rushing toward Earth; Know when to strike

Earth is con­stant­ly bat­tling the radi­a­tion and attacks on its mag­net­ic field that are com­ing from the sun, but late­ly things have gone from bad to pret­ty bad. Hav­ing recent­ly escaped a poten­tial G5 class solar storm from an unsta­ble sunspot, anoth­er threat is now upon Earth. A hole has formed in the south­ern hemi­sphere of the Sun, releas­ing a high-ener­gy plas­ma stream. This stream of plas­ma, also known as fast-mov­ing solar winds, is expect­ed to impact Earth lat­er this week, caus­ing a pow­er­ful solar storm. Read on to learn the con­se­quences of this sun disruption.

The devel­op­ment was report­ed by SpaceWeather.com, which not­ed on its web­site: “A fast-mov­ing solar wind stream is expect­ed to impact Earth­’s mag­net­ic field on Novem­ber 19 or 20. It flows out of a south­ern hole in the Sun’s atmos­phere. High-lat­i­tude sky­watch­ers should keep an eye out for auro­ras lat­er this week.”

A dangerous solar storm is brewing for the weekend

While the web­site only talked about auro­ras, the approach­ing solar storm is capa­ble of much worse. While it’s not pos­si­ble to esti­mate how strong the incom­ing solar storm may be, it’s like­ly that it won’t be a very intense storm. How­ev­er, it is still capa­ble of jam­ming radio waves and caus­ing radio black­out. This can also affect GPS sys­tems. As a result, flight times may be delayed and ship trans­port may be affect­ed. If you’re in the affect­ed zone (which you can find out more about this week­end on the Nation­al Ocean­ic and Atmos­pher­ic Admin­is­tra­tion’s web­site), you should check to see if any of your flights have been postponed.

While this solar storm may not be strong, the threat of a G5 class solar storm has not com­plete­ly dis­ap­peared. The sun is still at the peak of its solar cycle and the inten­si­ty and fre­quen­cy of solar storms are only get­ting much worse. If you’re won­der­ing how this might affect you, know that such solar inter­fer­ence can dam­age satel­lites, affect cel­lu­lar net­works and Inter­net con­nec­tions, and cause pow­er out­ages. Although peo­ple are not direct­ly affect­ed by radi­a­tion, it can still cause a high num­ber of deaths due to dis­rup­tion to emer­gency ser­vices and pow­er out­ages in places of high importance.