Southern Quebec could see the Aurora Borealis in the coming days, a spectacle normally reserved for Nunavik.
Posted at 2:44 p.m
A rare “inverted sunspot” is active on the sun’s surface this week and has triggered a “double coronal mass ejection” that will disrupt Earth’s magnetic field on Wednesday evening and Thursday evening. These magnetic disturbances are the origin of the Aurora Borealis, the visible light of the night.
“Sunspots are more active areas of the Sun’s surface,” says Marc Jobin, an astronomer at the Montreal Planetarium. “If they have reversed polarity compared to other sunspots, they become more unstable and more prone to solar flares. »
Coronal mass ejections are more intense solar flares whose material reaches Earth a few days later. “It’s not easy to predict how they’re going to disrupt the magnetic field,” says Mr. Jobin.
The US National Oceanic and Aeronautical Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Group provides daily forecasts of the Aurora Borealis and forecasts of magnetic storms in Earth orbit. Currently, the peak predicted by NOAA will be reached tonight.
But another space weather website consulted by Mr Jobin, spaceweather.com, also predicted more intense activity for Thursday, even predicting storms could be visible in the northern states of the United States.
According to Mr. Jobin, the Aurora Borealis shouldn’t be visible from Montreal but could be further south than usual.
The inverted sunspot, named AR3296, is about to transition to the opposite side of Earth from the Sun. But within 25 days, if it still exists, it could face Earth again. “In my opinion, the two coronal mass ejections this week are far from depleting the energy of this sunspot,” says Jobin.