LOS ANGELES — A solar storm was due to arrive Saturday morning and last through Sunday, slamming into Earth's magnetic field. Scientists said it will be a minor event, and they have notified power grid operators, airlines and other potentially affected parties. “We don't see any ill effects to any systems,” said forecaster Joe Kunches at the US Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado. There's a bright side to stormy space weather: It tends to spawn colorful northern lights as the charged particles bombard Earth's outer magnetic field. Shimmering auroras may be visible at the United States-Canada border and northern Europe this weekend, Kunches said. The sun unleashed an X-class solar flare — the most powerful type — at 12:52 P.M. EDT (1652 GMT) Thursday. The storm also triggered a huge eruption of solar plasma known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, which is now streaking directly toward Earth at roughly 3 million mph. The CME is expected to hit our planet at 6:20 A.M. EDT (1020 GMT) today Saturday, plus or minus seven hours, according to researchers with the Space Weather Lab at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.Thursday's solar outburst officially rated as an X1.4-class flare, making it the strongest sun storm of the summer so far. The flare and CME erupted from a massive sunspot known as AR1520, which scientists say may be up to 186,000 miles long. The CME's arrival at Earth will likely spawn moderate to severe geomagnetic storms, which may cause temporary disruptions to GPS signals, radio communications and power grids, scientists said. The CME “could produce aurora as far south as northern California and Alabama,” C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA Goddard, told SPACE.com in an email update. Auroras result when charged particles from the sun collide with molecules high up in Earth's atmosphere, generating a glow. The northern and southern lights are usually restricted to high latitutes because Earth's magnetic field lines tend to funnel these particles over the planet's poles. — Agencies
