Merry Christmas!

Sunday, 24 December 2017 18:48 UTC

Merry Christmas!

We are currently under the influence of a coronal hole solar wind stream. The solar wind speed has picked up to 550km/s but there hasn't really been much of a geomagnetic response as the solar wind density and interplanetary magnetic field values have been rather mediocre.

This solar wind comes from a very long and narrow coronal hole that obviously wasn't capable of producing much of a dense shock wave (also known as a Co-rotating Interaction Region) ahead of the high speed solar wind stream. It is usually this shock ahead of the high speed solar wind stream that causes the most geomagnetic instability. A fun fact you might didn't know before.

Remain vigilant nonetheless in the hours ahead, if the direction of the IMF (Bz) turns southward for a while we might still end up with active geomagnetic conditions with a Kp of 4.

That's what we have in store for you here on planet Earth but back on our Sun things are really quiet. Solar activity is very low (A and B class only) despite the presence of one numbered sunspot region on the earth-facing disk. Sunspot region 2692 is however a simple Beta sunspot region which isn't capable of producing C, M or X-class events. We are slowly crawling towards solar minimum.

Now that you're up to date again, we'd like to wish all of our visitors a very Merry Christmas!

Header image provided by Ed Touwen.
Any mentioned solar flare in this article has a scaling factor applied by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the reported solar flares are 42% smaller than for the science quality data. The scaling factor has been removed from our archived solar flare data to reflect the true physical units.

Thank you for reading this article! Did you have any trouble with the technical terms used in this article? Our help section is the place to be where you can find in-depth articles, a FAQ and a list with common abbreviations. Still puzzled? Just post on our forum where we will help you the best we can! Never want to miss out on a space weather event or one of our news articles again? Subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and download the SpaceWeatherLive app for Android and iOS!

Latest news

Support SpaceWeatherLive.com!

A lot of people come to SpaceWeatherLive to follow the Sun's activity or if there is aurora to be seen, but with more traffic comes higher server costs. Consider a donation if you enjoy SpaceWeatherLive so we can keep the website online!

23%
Support SpaceWeatherLive with our merchandise
Check out our merchandise

Latest alerts

Get instant alerts!

Space weather facts

Last X-flare2024/03/23X1.1
Last M-flare2024/03/28M6.1
Last geomagnetic storm2024/03/25Kp5 (G1)
Spotless days
Last spotless day2022/06/08
Monthly mean Sunspot Number
February 2024124.7 +1.7

This day in history*

Solar flares
12024M7.0
22001M6.17
32024M6.1
42000M4.46
52022M4.0
ApG
1200144G2
2200327G2
3199721G2
4201727G1
5200421G1
*since 1994

Social networks