Faint CME - glancing blow possible

Saturday, 6 February 2016 13:47 UTC

Faint CME - glancing blow possible

A small filament erupted last night from the Sun's southwestern quadrant. A faint coronal mass ejection was launched that could give us a glancing blow on 9 February.

This was far from a major eruption and only a faint partial halo coronal mass ejection was launched at a width of about 120 degrees as seen on SOHO/LASCO C2 coronagraph imagery. It is heading mostly south-west of Earth's orbit at a speed between 400 and 500km/s but a glancing blow can not excluded somewhere during the second half of 9 February. We do not expect geomagnetic storm conditions (G1 or higher) from this plasma cloud but it might be of interest for high latitude sky watchers. A major impact is unlikely and we should at most see a minor increase in the solar wind speed and the IMF parameters if the plasma cloud arrives at our planet. Not too much to get excited about but during these quiet space weather periods we are of course happy with anything the Sun provides us with!

Animation: SOHO/LASCO C2 coronagraph animation showing the faint partial halo CME.

Any mentioned solar flare in this article has a scaling factor applied by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the reported solar flares are 42% smaller than for the science quality data. The scaling factor has been removed from our archived solar flare data to reflect the true physical units.

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