Embry-Riddle Researcher Measures Waves Generated by Extreme Solar Storm that Wreaked Havoc on Earth

As exceptionally powerful ejections of magnetically charged plasma from the sun called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) blasted toward Earth in May 2024, two NASA spacecraft formations detected never-before-witnessed solar storm activity. Now, in newly published research, Dr. Katariina Nykyri of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University has used the data to analyze and describe explosive releases of magnetic energy and high-energy particle bursts occurring along the boundaries of incoming CMEs very close to Earth.

Professor Katariina Nykyri headshot
Dr. Katariina Nykyri

The findings could help advance understanding of phenomena that threaten communication systems, power grids, and avionics on Earth, as well as the safety of astronauts traveling and working in space.

“We never had instrumentation before that could capture these explosive releases of energy in such a high cadence of measurements,” said Nykyri, professor in the Department of Physical Sciences and a director of the Lab for Solar-Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Research.
“This is the science we need to understand these phenomena and develop prediction tools to protect or shut down vulnerable electronic systems on Earth ahead of solar ejections or warn astronauts to postpone activity outside of their spacecraft that could expose them to dangerous radiation.”

Nykyri recently hosted a 70-person meeting at Embry-Riddle that discussed such space weather investigation and involved representatives from research institutions, universities, industry and NASA, including members of NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission team, which helped document in detail the complex phenomena occurring within the May 2024 storm.

The storm occurred May 10-12, during a period of peak solar activity that occurs about every 11 years. The exceptionally large and powerful CMEs barreled from the sun toward Earth at millions of miles per hour, and, as the charged particles pushed past slower solar winds, they created eddies. Known as Kelvin-Helmholtz waves, such eddies form in the same way that a river’s faster central flow creates circling patterns in the slower water along the river’s banks.

NASA's MMS mission consists of four spacecraft flying in a tetrahedron formation in order to produce three-dimensional measurements of space weather. The spacecraft happened to be flying “directly inside the turbulent boundary region” of the incoming CMEs, Nykyri said, and were able to detect continuous bursts of energy and particles accelerating to tremendous speeds. Two robotic spacecraft known as THEMIS-ARTEMIS, which were orbiting the moon about 240,000 miles away from the MMS, also detected the activity and provided additional data for comparison analysis.

Group of people stand in front of Wright Flyer on Embry-Riddle's campus
Professor Katariina Nykyri recently hosted a meeting at Embry-Riddle attended by the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Science Working Team, which includes a wide array of NASA personnel and researchers from universities and industry. (Photo: Embry-Riddle)

Within the boundary turbulence, the giant Kelvin-Helmholtz waves created bursts of magnetic reconnection, which is like an exponentially bigger version of when a positively charged jumper cable touches the negatively charged cable and causes a surge of electricity, heat and sparks. The reconnection then created higher-frequency waves known as Whistler waves, which caused high-energy electrons to scatter. Such activity could endanger manned spaceflight.

The magnetic reconnection phenomenon and its effects create “a kind of portals into the Earth’s magnetic shield,” Nykyri said, with charged plasma “getting into our planetary magnetic backyard.”

Dr. Aroh Barjatya, executive director of the Center for Space and Atmospheric Research, called Nykyri’s research “an outstanding example of how fundamental scientific discovery can have far-reaching societal impact. By revealing previously unobserved processes that occur as solar storms travel toward Earth, her team is advancing the science needed to improve space weather prediction and strengthen the resilience of the technologies we rely on every day.”

“This work reflects Embry-Riddle's commitment to conducting world-class research that expands scientific understanding while helping address challenges critical to our nation's future in space," Barjatya added.

During the 2024 solar storm, the periodic incursions into the Earth’s magnetic shield lasted for several hours and caused a number of problems. Aircraft surveillance systems were temporarily thwarted by data gaps and positioning errors in GPS systems, high-frequency radio communications were disrupted in some regions, and farming machinery in the Midwest that was guided by GPS basically went rogue.

“Farmers in the Midwest lost $500 million, because their equipment that operates autonomously was just planting seeds randomly due to GPS errors,” Nykyri said.

Fixed observational spacecraft positioned to monitor solar ejections are located extremely close to the sun and then about a million miles from Earth. The energetic particle scattering activity driven by the Kelvin-Helmholtz waves and detected by the MMS, which occurred at about 88,000 miles from Earth, would not have been observed from either of the usual observational locations. Such activity could be especially detrimental to manned spaceflight.

“The current space weather computational models that try during a CME to model how long it will take for the clouds of plasma and magnetic field to arrive at the Earth, and how these fields evolve and affect energetic particle transport are limited, because they can’t resolve smaller-scale processes like the Kelvin-Helmholtz waves,” that occur along the way, said Nykyri. “These are dynamically evolving processes, so we really need to have a fleet of many, many monitoring spacecraft, especially now that we want to send astronauts to the moon — so we can warn them of dangerous particle events.”

During the particularly strong May 2024 solar storm, the solar ejection “peeled off layers of the Earth’s magnetic field as though it were an onion,” Nykyri said, transferring energy to the night side of the Earth, where it built up in the long tail of the magnetic field on the darkened side of the Earth called the magnetotail. As the energy accumulated, Nykyri said, the magnetotail “was like a rubber band that stores and stores energy, and at a certain point, it can’t store any more, so it snaps,” accelerating charged particles into the Earth’s atmosphere, endangering communications, aviation and power delivery networks and generating auroras, more commonly known as the northern lights.

Generally, each kind of aurora is most visible from one of the Earth’s poles. During the 2024 solar storm, however, the northern lights were extraordinarily extensive, and their giant streaks and swirls of ruby and emerald were seen as far south as Florida and even Mexico.