April 7, 2010: Space Storm

[xoxoxoBruce]

A huge space storm of the Sun's coronal mass ejection, whacked to Earth on Monday. As a result there were beautiful Auroras around the world.

This is what it looked like, from the International Space Station flying through it, at 17,500 mph.

On 3 April, the SOHO spacecraft spotted a cloud of charged particles called a coronal mass ejection (CME) shooting from the sun at 500 kilometres per second. This velocity suggested the front would reach Earth in roughly three days.
"It hit earlier and harder than forecast," says Doug Biesecker of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. Fortunately, the storm was not intense enough to interfere strongly with power grids or satellite navigation, but it did trigger dazzling auroras in places like Iceland.

The science of it all is a little mind boggling, but it looks cool.

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