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Northern Lights Imperiled Infrastructure From Power Grids To Satellites

An anonymous reader quotes a Bloomberg article, written by Jason Leopold: The aurora borealis, or northern lights, is a colorful display in the night sky that comes from geomagnetic storms in space. When charged particles from the sun smash into the Earth's upper atmosphere, they create bright, kale...

An anonymous reader quotes a Bloomberg article, written by Jason Leopold: The aurora borealis, or northern lights, is a colorful display in the night sky that comes from geomagnetic storms in space. "A large group of unstable sunspots on the Sun's surface unleashed several powerful solar flares, immediately affecting the Earth's outer atmosphere and causing disruptions in high-frequency (HF) radio communications," he wrote. On May 9, a day before the northern lights extravaganza, staff at the Space Weather Prediction Center "activated" the North American Electric Reliability Corp. hotline to make sure the regulator was prepared.

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