Small coronal hole faces Earth

Saturday, 10 June 2017 09:08 UTC

Small coronal hole faces Earth

We're in a really quiet space weather period at the moment and there were no major space weather events the past week.

Our coronal hole detector did pick up a small coronal hole facing our planet today. While this coronal hole is not large, it is at least something worth to keep an eye on if you are a high latitude sky watcher that isn't plagued by the midnight sun.

This coronal hole are actually more the remains of what used to be a much larger coronal hole. This is indeed a coronal hole that is in the process of closing up. If we compare it with how it looked like during the last rotation we can clearly see how it shrunk in size. Some smaller open areas remain if we look at the SDO imagery now so we'd be more correct if we spoke of multiple smaller openings but for the sake of simplicity we will refer to this feature as one coronal hole.

It is hard to say what kind of geomagnetic activity we can get from such small openings but it will likely not be anything major. In two to three days from now we might see an uptick in geomagnetic activity if there is a clear solar wind stream arrival but geomagnetic storm conditions (Kp5 or higher) seems unlikely. Nonetheless for the die hards out there who can not stand these quiet times, this could be something worth keeping in mind for the upcoming days.

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.

Thank you for reading this article! Did you have any trouble with the technical terms used in this article? Our help section is the place to be where you can find in-depth articles, a FAQ and a list with common abbreviations. Still puzzled? Just post on our forum where we will help you the best we can! Never want to miss out on a space weather event or one of our news articles again? Subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and download the SpaceWeatherLive app for Android and iOS!

Latest news

Support SpaceWeatherLive.com!

A lot of people come to SpaceWeatherLive to follow the Sun's activity or if there is aurora to be seen, but with more traffic comes higher server costs. Consider a donation if you enjoy SpaceWeatherLive so we can keep the website online!

100%
Support SpaceWeatherLive with our merchandise
Check out our merchandise

Latest alerts

Get instant alerts!

Space weather facts

Last X-flare2024/11/06X2.39
Last M-flare2024/11/13M1.7
Last geomagnetic storm2024/11/10Kp5+ (G1)
Spotless days
Last spotless day2022/06/08
Monthly mean Sunspot Number
October 2024166.4 +25
November 2024166 -0.4
Last 30 days163.2 +18.4

This day in history*

Solar flares
11999X1.15
21999M8.06
32005M5.58
41999M4.11
52005M3.72
DstG
11960-167G3
21998-109G2
32012-108G2
41989-105
51979-90G1
*since 1994

Social networks