Northern lights: more sky shows coming from solar storms

— -- Here's some solace for anyone sad they missed last week's fabulous Northern Lights show.

Alert your travel agent — Mr. Sun is angry and we'll likely see solar storm sequels and more sky shows. We're due for about one a month, say solar physics experts, for the next year or two.

"The solar cycle is increasing and so, we are going to get more storms," says University of Michigan space weather expert Tamas Gombosi. "It's not the end of the world, there is no Maya 2012 nonsense going on," he adds, a reference to the notion, widely debunked by scholars , that the classic Maya civilization predicted the end of the world for December of this year.

Instead, we'll likely see more light shows just like the one delivered by the strong "S3" class solar radiation storm (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scales solar storms from S1 to S5, the strongest, a heavenly version of their hurricane ratings). The S3 storm glanced against the Earth's magnetic field starting Jan. 23, helping to fill the skies in northern climes with a staggering light show the next evening, the famed aurora borealis.

"Once an eruption happens on the sun, even the biggest ones, we'll have at least a day's warning, Gombosi says. As you likely recall from junior high, the sun typically waxes and wanes in outbursts on an 11-year scale, which can vary a few years on either side of that scale.

The sun launched another salvo from a solar flare on Friday. So, stay tuned.

German astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwabe first noted the cycle in 1843. Schwabe was looking for "Vulcan," a planet then theorized to orbit closer to the sun than Mercury. Vulcan was a bust, but while making some 8,486 drawings ( still kept by the Royal Astronomical Society in London) of the sun over decades of observations , Working with telescopes designed to look safely at the sun, Schwabe discovered the cycle of a relatively untroubled solar surface followed by outbursts of sunspots and other disturbances, the ones that spawn solar storms.

"The sun is mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace," in the words ( surprisingly snappy when sung), of the band, They Might be Giants. Superheated gas, or plasma, steadily eddies up from this furnace to the surface of the star, bubbling and blazing at temperatures of around 9,940 degrees Fahrenheit. When the sun's magnetic field gets a little tangled and slows this rise, cooler sunspots result (at merely 5,000 degrees in some cases) draped by strong magnetic fields that can erupt in arcs, and spit out solar storms like the sound of a crack coming off of a whip.

"These eruptions kind of come off the sun in a cone shape, and sometimes head our way," says Solar Dynamics Observatory scientist Phillip Chamberlin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. NASA launched SDO in 2010, to help keep an eye on solar storms, which can threaten spacecraft and affect radio signals. The spacecraft circles the Earth on a tilted orbit that keeps it continually in touch with communication antennas in New Mexico and only allows for two brief 70-minute windows a year when it is not watching the sun.

So, after SDO scientists observed the Jan. 19 solar storm start with an outburst of charged particles called a "coronal mass ejection," they had posted a movie of the event online within 15 minutes. By the next day, NOAA space weather experts could predict the blast would pass north of Earth and its arrival time on Jan. 23. "The got it right to within seven minutes," Chamberlin says. "That is simply amazing."

Plenty of time to book a plane flight to Norway and see an aurora, too. Although your flight might take a little longer, because radio blackouts like the one caused by solar storms trigger Federal Aviation Administration safety rules requiring that airlines slightly follow longer flight plans away from the poles so that the interference doesn't interrupt radio contact.

Auroras result from the charged particles in a solar storm smacking into the atmosphere at polar latitudes where the Earth's magnetic field declines and doesn't deflect the blast as far out in space. The particles from the Jan. 23 storm, which peaked the next day, charged up the Earth's magnetic field as well, triggering a so-called geomagnetic storm (a minor G1 class storm), that enhanced the Northern Lights by helping to push them farther from the poles.

"We'll be seeing a lot of them," Gombosi says, as the current solar "max" or high point of activity looks like it will come in 2013, following a few years of extended solar quiet from the sun. Storms typically continue to happen frequently in the year after the solar max as well, Chamberlin says. "We'll be plenty busy."

So, don't get too excited if you hear about a solar storm, unless you have a lot of frequent-flier miles to burn. "There are plenty of hurricanes that never come onshore and just head off into the ocean," Gombosi says. "Most solar storms are the same."