Weak CME could give us a glancing blow

Thursday, 29 June 2017 23:13 UTC

Weak CME could give us a glancing blow

Yes, a sign of life from your SpaceWeatherLive staff! It has been a very quiet space weather period the past few weeks with pretty much no geomagnetic or solar events worth mentioning. We did reach the minor G1 geomagnetic storm levels briefly 2 weeks ago but that was nothing too spectacular. Our Sun is even more quiet: its been almost 3 months ago since we last had an M-class solar flare and the last C-class solar flare was also a solid 3 weeks ago. Does that mean you are reading a news article without any news? Not exactly as a possibly interesting eruption took place yesterday that could give us some aurora in a few days from now.

Minor coronal dimming was observed yesterday afternoon near sunspot region 2664 which could be an indicator that some solar plasma was ejected into space. The eruption was related to a long duration B1 solar flare at the same time. Coronagraph imagery from SOHO/LASCO shows us a slow partial halo coronal mass ejection as you can see in the animation below.

The coronal mass ejection as captured by the SOHO/LASCO C2 coronagraph.

The plasma cloud is slow (at most 300km/s) and can be seen as a partial halo structure that reaches almost 180 degrees as seen on these SOHO/LASCO C2 images which sees the expanding plasma cloud from earth's point of view. Note that there is a second coronal mass ejection heading towards the east. This is from an unrelated event and should be ignored.

Our conclusion is that this plasma cloud could arrive as a glancing blow at Earth on July 2nd or 3rd due to the relatively favourable earth-directed position of the eruption and the near 180 degrees partial halo outline. Geomagnetic storming is not expected as the plasma cloud is too slow and likely will not impact us head on but it could be an interesting event to keep an eye on for high latitude sky watchers that aren't plagued by the midnight sun.

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!

SpaceWeatherLive Pro
Support SpaceWeatherLive with our merchandise
Check out our merchandise

Latest alerts

Get instant alerts!

Space weather facts

Last X-flare2024/12/08X2.2
Last M-flare2024/12/23M1.0
Last geomagnetic storm2024/12/17Kp5+ (G1)
Spotless days
Last spotless day2022/06/08
Monthly mean Sunspot Number
November 2024152.5 -13.9
December 2024106.6 -45.9
Last 30 days116.1 -41.8

This day in history*

Solar flares
12015M6.75
21998M3.34
32013M2.36
42013M1.97
52001M1.69
DstG
12002-67
22000-62G2
31989-60
42014-57
51982-53G1
*since 1994

Social networks