The sun, in a heightened state of solar activity, has hurled a potent mass of material at Earth.
This could mean glorious aurora, or Northern Lights, over parts of the U.S. on July 24, according to the federal government’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
The inciting event, which occurred on July 21, is intense but normal. It’s called a coronal mass ejection, or CME. These occur when the sun ejects a mass of super hot gas (plasma). “It’s like scooping up a piece of the sun and ejecting it into space,” Mark Miesch, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, previously told Mashable. These types of events happen more as the sun approaches the peak of its 11-year solar cycle, which is expected in July 2025.
Why Earthlings are safe when huge solar storms strike our planet
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