According to the U.S. Meteorological and Oceanographic Administration (NOAA), Earth is currently experiencing its first “extreme” solar storm since 2003. The level five solar storm on the five-level scale was observed Friday evening (local time), according to the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.
The solar storm is expected to last through the weekend, NOAA said. The agency also said GPS, power grids, spacecraft, satellite navigation and other technologies could be affected.
In addition to the possible disruptions, solar storms also provide impressive northern lights. These can sometimes be seen considerably further south than the regions where they can normally be observed.
Beautiful northern lights also in Austria
For example, northern lights were also reported in Austria. Due to the strong geomagnetic storm, these were visible up to the Swiss latitudes, the Federal Office for Meteorology and Climatology (Meteoswiss) announced on Friday evening on the online platform X.
According to NOAA, category five, classified as “extreme,” was last reached in October 2003 during the so-called Halloween storms. At that time there were power outages in Sweden and transformers were damaged in South Africa.
Danger to high-tech infrastructure
Solar storms can cause a state of emergency. They do not pose a danger to the earth, but they do pose a threat to the high-tech world. During a solar storm, high-energy particles and a huge plasma cloud rush towards the planets and can enormously disrupt the infrastructure on and around Earth. The private American space company SpaceX experienced this painfully two years ago when it lost about 40 of its satellites to a solar storm.
Source: Krone
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