Huge solar storm risks flights, power, GPS

A massive solar storm hurtling toward Earth at 4 million mph threatened to disrupt airline flights and power grids early Thursday, NASA officials said. Analysts at NASA's Goddard Space Weather Lab said the stream of highly charged particles, stemming from the largest solar flare in five years, "could spark a strong-to-severe geomagnetic storm" starting between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. EST Thursday, SpaceWeather.com reported. The effects could linger through Friday morning. "It's hitting us right in the nose," Joe Kunches, a scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., told The Christian Science Monitor. The disruption could also disrupt radio signals, satellite networks and GPS services, particularly in northern areas, Goddard and NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said. U.S. airlines diverted long-haul flights that pass near the North Pole because of the risk posed by the intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation at high latitudes, the British newspaper The Independent reported. The shock wave could also disrupt the earth's magnetic field, compressing it on the day side and extending outward on the night side, scientists said. The stream of charged particles ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere was triggered by two giant solar flares that erupted an hour apart Tuesday, scientists said. The particles will hit Mars as well as Earth and pass by several NASA spacecraft, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. Besides the possible disruptions, the storm will likely create auroras -- known as the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, in northern latitudes -- in North America Thursday evening. Auroras -- which illuminate the northern horizon as a greenish glow or sometimes a faint red, as if the sun were rising from an unusual direction -- could dip as far south as the Great Lakes between Canada and the United States or even lower, Kunches told the Monitor. But the full moon could obscure any viewing, he said. The aurora borealis were named after the Roman goddess of dawn, Aurora, and the Greek word for the north wind, boreas, by French philosopher-astronomer Pierre Gassendi in 1621. In 1989, a strong solar storm knocked out the power grid in Quebec, causing 6 million people to lose power.