Solar

A spectacular aurora was displayed across the Northern Hemisphere because of a large solar storm that blasted from the Sun few days ago.

On 1 August, the side of the Sun that faces the Earth erupted in a blaze of activity, called as "coronal mass ejection". The storms throw up to 10 billion tons of plasma off the surface of the star and hurling into space at around a million miles an hour. The distance between Earth and Sun of around 93 million miles was covered in just three and a half days by the storm.

According to Leon Golub, a scientist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), it was the "first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time".

The flare was categorized as class C3, which is relatively small. Flares of X or M class, capable of doing damage on Earth. Beyond auroras, the C-class flares dont have that much effect on Earth.

Dramatic auroras were seen in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Greenland and across the Canada and northern United States as the expanding bubble of gas slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The cause behind this beautiful display is the charged particle interacting with Earth's magnetic fields. The solar matter collide with nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere, at the poles where the are drawned.

This flare have done no damage so far, but NASA astronomers have already warned that the electrical systems will be heavily damaged if a solar storm of much larger size hits the planet. The Sun is expected to spurt out large storms in 2013, as part of its 11-year cycle.

Telegraph wires were burned out across Europe and the USA by a huge flare in 1859.. The so-called "Carrington flare", named after its discoverer, “smothered two-thirds of the Earth’s skies in a blood-red aurora a night later, and crippled all global navigation and global communication, such as it was at that time. Compasses spun uselessly and the telegraph network went down as phantom electricity surged through the wire,” according to Dr Stuart Clark, author of The Sun Kings.

Power grid in Quebec went down for 9 hours because of another solar storm in 1989, causing revenue loss of hundreds of millions' .