A Closer Observation of Space Weather Events

It was Mother’s Day 2024, and Jason Beedle’s mom had traveled thousands of miles to see her son’s Ph.D. graduation in Washington, D.C. While the Capitol lay under a blanket of clouds that evening, Jason’s phone kept buzzing with alerts about an extraordinary Northern Lights display lighting the night sky from his home state of Alaska all the way down to Northern Mexico. The duo lamented missing the dazzling skyward spectacle that they might have seen back home.

But that cosmic event didn’t fade away from memory; Jason Beedle, now a research scientist in the UNH Space Science Center, has authored a study about that same Mother’s Day solar superstorm that caused the aurora he missed — the most powerful geomagnetic storm since 2003. The observations from Beedle’s study provide a firsthand view into the transfer of energy between the solar wind plasma and the boundary of Earth’s protective shield, called the magnetosphere, during an unusually intense space weather event. 

“I expected there might be something different with the transfer of energy during a solar superstorm as strong as this one, but the results showed that the underlying physics within the magnetosphere seemed to be essentially the same, regardless of the space weather events,” Beedle explains. 

On May 8 and 9, 2024, a series of large outbursts of solar plasma, called coronal mass ejections, were hurtled from the sun. Combined, these led to a geomagnetic superstorm when they collided with Earth's protective magnetic field from May 10 to 12. When events like these impact Earth's magnetosphere, the protective shield is both compressed closer into Earth and opened to the influence of the solar plasma. Through this process, energy is deposited from the solar plasma into the magnetosphere and eventually into Earth's upper atmosphere, driving the spectacular aurora, but also causing disruptions to our satellite infrastructure, GPS, power grids, and radio communications here on Earth.

Space scientists like Beedle study solar storms and space weather to learn more about the particle processes and ultimately to help predict how such storms can impact the near-Earth environment, similar to weather predictions here on earth, so we can protect our technology and infrastructure.

Using data from the four spacecraft that comprise NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, which orbit through the boundary of the Earth’s magnetosphere, Beedle found evidence of atypical plasma heating during that storm – something he says is strange and could indicate the presence of additional heating mechanisms beyond the typical processes that scientists anticipate — but surprisingly he did not see any change in the energy transport throughout the magnetosphere.

As the Mother’s Day solar superstorm compressed the magnetosphere closer to the Earth, orbiting satellites were suddenly left outside of the protective shield and exposed to the full effects of the solar wind blasting toward them. This affected the GPS systems that guided tractors during the planting season, which resulted in approximately $500 million in damages to farmers in the U.S. Midwestern region. 

This was the largest solar storm since the MMS mission launched in 2015, thus providing an ideal case study.  “Before that mission, we didn’t have the capabilities to observe these small-scale space plasma dynamics directly and examine their impacts up close” Beedle adds. 

Funding for this research was provided by NASA.