Venus is suffering from extreme space weather this week after a giant solar
On Monday, September 5, NASA's Sun-observing STEREO-A spacecraft detected coronal mass ejections (CME) from the stellar corona.
This CME is the second in a week to reachVenus; another erupted on the Sun on Wednesday, August 30 and reached the planet three days later. Just at that moment, the European Solar Orbiter spacecraft flew by.
Giant coronal mass ejection on September 5, 2022. Image courtesy of NASA/STEREO
Giorgio Ho, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, told SpaceWeather.com that the latest eruption was not "an ordinary event."
“I can confidently say that event 5September is one of the largest, if not the largest, solar energy particle storms we have seen since the launch of Solar Orbiter in 2020,” explains one of the lead researchers on the energy particle detection instrument aboard Solar Orbiter. "That's at least an order of magnitude stronger than last week's CME radiation storm."
The source of a powerful eruption is considered to be solarspot AR3088. They have become much more powerful since they disappeared from the sight of the Earth. According to SpaceWeather.com, the sun's rotation will cause the sunspot to rotate towards the planet next week. And this means that the Earth will also undergo cosmic activity in the near future.
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Cover photo: Jason Major