Space Exploration

Forecasters can predict the speed a solar storm travels and its strength, but the north-south orientation is the wild card. And this time, Earth got dealt a good card with a northern orientation, which is "pretty benign," Kunches said. If it had been southern, that would have caused the most damaging technological disruption and biggest auroras. "We're not out of the woods," Kunches said Thursday morning. "It was a good start. If I'm a power grid, I'm really happy so far." But that storm orientation can and is changing, he said.  "It could flip-flop and we could end up with the strength of the storm still to come," Kunches said from the NOAA forecast center. North American utilities so far have not reported any problems, said Kimberly Mielcarek, spokeswoman for the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a consortium of electricity grid operators.

A massive cloud of charged particles can disrupt utility grids, airline flights, satellite networks and glovbal positioning services, especially in northern areas. But the same blast can also paint colorful auroras farther from the poles than normal. Astronomers say the sun has been relatively quiet for some time. And this storm, while strong, may seem fiercer because Earth has been lulled by several years of weak solar activity.

The storm is part of the sun's normal 11-year cycle, which is supposed to reach a peak next year. Solar storms do not harm people, but they do disrupt technology. And during the last peak around 2002, experts learned that GPS was vulnerable to solar outbursts. Because new technology has flourished since then, scientists could discover that some new systems are also at risk, said Jeffrey Hughes, director of the Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling at Boston University. The region of the sun that erupted can still send more blasts our way, Kunches said. Another set of active sunspots is ready to aim at Earth. "This is a big sun spot group, particularly nasty," NASA solar physicist David Hathaway said. "Things are really twisted up and mixed up. It keeps flaring." Storms like this start with sun spots, Hathaway said. Then comes an initial solar flare of subatomic particles that resemble a filament coming out of the sun. That part from this storm hit Earth only minutes after the initial burst, bringing radio and radiation disturbances. After that comes the coronal mass ejection, which looks like a growing bubble and takes a couple days to reach Earth.