A solar storm from a hole in the sun is predicted to hit earth within hours.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has classed the storm as a relatively minor G1, and said it is “likely” to impact Earth on Wednesday.
The organisation's storm scale ranges from G1 to G5 and at its strongest can cause widespread blackouts and major electrical problems as electricity grids collapse and satellite navigation goes down
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According to NOAA, a G1 storm - its lowest category - can cause power grid failures, disrupt satellites and affect the migrations of animals.
Its latest forecast reads: “There is a chance for G1 (Minor) storm levels on 03 Aug due to continuing CH HSS effects.”
The warning comes as a result of a hole in the sun.
Solar storms happen after explosions in the Sun’s atmosphere that then send out huge bursts of energy through solar flares, also known as a coronal mass ejection.
NOAA says that solar coronal mass ejections involve a billion tons or so of plasma from the sun, with its embedded magnetic field, arriving at Earth.
Meanwhile, a recent study found that space weather events could be affecting more than GPS and radios.
Physicist Cameron Patterson of Lancaster University explains: “Most of us have at one point heard the dreaded words: ‘your train is delayed due to a signalling failure’.
“While we usually connect these faults to rain, snow and leaves on the line, you may not have considered that the Sun can also cause railway signals to malfunction.”
The electric currents induced by space weather, he explained, can interfere with the normal operation of signalling systems — turning green signals red when there is no train nearby.
In railway networks, the location of trains are tracked by splitting the lines up into small, consecutive segments known as “blocks” that tend to be 0.6–1.2 miles long.
Each block is tied to a signal which flags whether or not a train is currently in that block.
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