geomagnetic storm tagged posts

The GRAPES-3 muon telescope, the largest and most sensitive cosmic ray monitor recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays that indicated a crack in the Earth’s magnetic shield. Credit: TIFR

The GRAPES-3 muon telescope located at TIFR’s Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Ooty recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays of about 20 GeV, on 22 June 2015 lasting for 2 hours. The burst occurred when a giant cloud of plasma ejected from the solar corona, and moving with a speed of about 2.5 million km/h struck our planet, causing a severe compression of Earth’s magnetosphere from 11 to 4 times the radius of Earth. It triggered a severe geomagnetic storm that generated aurora borealis, and radio signal blackouts in many high latitude countries.

Earth’s magnetosphere extends over a radius of a million kilometers...

Visualization of Earth’s magnetic environment, with the magnetic field as a protective shield, generated by the strong internal magnetic field in Earth’s core.. Credit: Martin Rother/GFZ

A geomagnetic storm on 1/17/13, provided unique observations that finally resolved a long-standing scientific problem. For decades, scientists had asked how particles hitting Earth’s magnetosphere were lost. A likely mechanism involved certain electromagnetic waves scattering particles into Earth’s atmosphere. More recently, another mechanism was proposed that caused particles to be lost in interplanetary space...

On Jan. 7, 2014, the Sun’s surface erupted with an unusually large explosion, called coronal mass ejection (CME), with NOAA releasing a significant false alarm geomagnetic storm at Earth. Credit: NASA

When the sun hurls a billion tons of high-energy particles and magnetic fields into space at speeds of >a million miles/ hour and the ‘space weather’ conditions are right, the resulting geomagnetic storm at Earth can wreak havoc on communication and navigation systems, electrical power grids, and pose radiation hazards to astronauts and airline passengers and crew.

University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Center (SSC) scientists are now adding some powerful tools to the predictive toolbox using data from NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, Geo-chemistry, and Ranging, or MESSENGER,...