Massive Solar Storm Set To Hit Earth; Comms, Telecom Impact Likely

The planet Earth switched to an unusually unpleasant phase of deadbeat, owing to an enormous catastrophe at the hands of a Wuhan fish market. Sounds like quite an odd description, when one puts it like that. As kill scores continue every day due to the global pandemic, there’s another bad news for the Earth-The Sun has awoken!

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), an intense high-speed solar storm flare is approaching the Earth at a speed of 1.6 million kilometres per hour and is expected to hit Earth’s magnetic field later today, impacting GPS navigation, mobile phone signals and satellite TV.

From a gaping hole in the Sun’s atmosphere, a ‘high-speed’ stream of highly charged particles has been launched in the direction of Earth which may trigger a minor ‘solar storm’ in the Earth’s magnetosphere. The scientists describe that once the energy-charged particles enter the magnetosphere, the particles might perhaps be guided further into the magnetic field lines and penetrate into Earth’s atmosphere near both the north and south poles.

Due to the highly charged particles which have high velocities from the solar atmosphere gets accelerated to large fractions of the speed of the light towards the Earth, the solar storm has significant impacts that likely to be caused. The Space Weather Prediction Centre in a release on Saturday, July 10 stated “When energetic protons collide with satellites or humans in space, they can penetrate deep into the object that they collide with and cause damage to electronic circuits or biological DNA.” As a result, it can cripple power grids, jam satellite communication, causing dangerous levels of radiation, impacting passengers and crews in high flying aircraft.

A solar flare is a sudden flash of increased brightness on the Sun, usually observed near its surface and in close proximity to a sunspot group. Powerful flares are often, but not always, accompanied by a coronal mass ejection.

The Centre have marked the solar flares at X1 wherein X denotes the classification and the number denotes the strength of the flare. The smallest flares are from the A-class. It is followed by B, C, M and X. The Sun goes through a solar cycle every 11 years that fluctuates the activity of the solar flare radiations. In this process, flares escape the Sun and hurl towards outer space. A strong solar flare has the potential to leave millions of people without power!