Space Hurricane from the Sun! page 1
oblivion 24th January 2012, 10:09 PM :hair: A wave of charged particles from an intense solar storm is raising alerts about airline flights and satellite operations — and raising the prospect of stunning auroral displays. The storm began when a powerful solar flare erupted on the sun (http://www.space.com/14319-huge-solar-eruption-sparks-radiation-storm.html) Monday, blasting a stream of charged particles toward our planet. This electromagnetic burst — called a coronal mass ejection, or CME — started hitting Earth somewhere around 10 a.m. ET Tuesday, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center. Experts at the center said that solar radiation levels were at their highest point since the Halloween storms of 2003 (http://www.space.com/712-latest-sun-flare-put-x28-strongest-record.html). Earlier estimates ranked the storm as the strongest since 2005 in terms of solar radiation, but Terry Onsager, a physicist ...