2024-05-13 17:46:07
On Friday evening, a level 5 solar or geomagnetic storm hit the Earth on a scale of 5 degrees, a level described as “severe,” for the first time since 2003, according to what the US Oceanic and Atmospheric Monitoring Agency announced.
The American company “Starlink”, a provider of satellite Internet services, affiliated with billionaire Elon Musk’s company “SpaceX”, warned on Saturday of “service disruption” due to the planet Earth being exposed to the largest geomagnetic storm in two decades as a result of solar activity.
Starlake owns about 60 percent of the approximately 7,500 satellites orbiting the Earth, and the company is a dominant player in the field of satellite Internet.
Musk said in a post on the “X” platform earlier that Starlink’s satellites are suffering from great pressure due to a geomagnetic solar storm, but they are holding up so far.
The US agency added that this storm resulted from the arrival of coronal mass emissions from the Sun to Earth. “GPS, power grids, spacecraft, satellite navigation and other technologies may be affected,” she said.
New Zealand electricity company Transpower New Zealand Limited reported that a number of power lines were closed across the country to prevent damage to the company’s equipment due to the strong solar storm.
A statement issued by the company said: “Transpower closed a number of power lines on the North and South Islands due to raising the warning level for the G4 geomagnetic storm that struck the Earth as a result of solar activity to the highest G5 category.”
Plasma explosions on the surface of the Sun trigger magnetic storms on Earth.
The storm is supposed to interact with the Earth’s magnetic field, which could send pulses of electrical current down the power lines and damage the station.
The storm is expected to continue through the weekend with the arrival of more of these emissions, according to the agency. The last such event to reach level five was in October 2003 and was called solar “Halloween storms.”
“For most people here on Earth, they won’t have to do anything,” said Rob Steinberg, a scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency’s Space Weather Prediction Center. The storm could produce the northern lights as far south as Alabama and northern California, but that has been difficult to predict. Scientists explained that these lights will not be the dramatic curtains of color usually associated with the northern lights, but rather more like spots of green colours
Last updated: May 11, 2024 – 21:57
Suggest a correction
2024-05-13 17:46:07