The May 2024 solar storm that brought stunning displays of the Northern Lights across the world had more effects than just the aurora, it turns out. Recent findings suggest that satellites orbiting the Earth were eerily close to colliding, which would’ve resulted in chaos. The northern lights seen from the west side of Grand Rapids around 10:30 p.
m. on Friday, May 9, 2024. Joel Bissell | MLive.
com From May 7 through May 10, the strongest solar storm since 2003 occurred, according to space.com . The Space Weather Prediction Center ranks geomagnetic storms into five categories depending on their strength, with a G1 storm being the weakest and a G5 storm being the strongest.
This was classified as a G5 storm. During such strong events, the energy that is released from the sun that causes the aurora has rather significant effects on Earth’s atmosphere as well. When the solar particles enter the atmosphere, they interact with atmospheric particles, causing that region of the atmosphere to become more dense.
Satellites in orbit “feel” this change in density and have a hard time maintaining their altitude. As a result, they start to sink. Experts report that during the May storm, satellites were sinking toward Earth at roughly 600 feet per day.
During solar storms, solar particles interacting with the atmosphere causes satellites to feel "drag". This then causes them to start sinking and losing altitude since the atmosphere becomes more dense. Graphic provided by NOAA.
NOAA To account for this, scientists will add thrust to the satellites to return them to their correct altitude. However, this significantly increases the chances of satellites colliding with one another as their navigation systems don’t have time to avoid collisions given the fast and chaotic nature of the corrections. Thankfully, this did not occur.
However, it did give experts an idea of how strong solar storms impact space traffic in today’s world. The last time a solar storm of this magnitude hit Earth was in 2003. There were not nearly as many satellites in orbit, just a few hundred compared to a few thousand today, so this was never as big of an issue as it is now.
With the peak of the solar cycle occurring now, we can expect more solar storms to affect Earth, though ones of this magnitude may not be repeated for quite some time..
