SpaceWeather.com Archive — Fri, Jun 13, 2025

« backFri, Jun 13, 2025forward »

FRIDAY THE 13TH GEOMAGNETIC STORM: Arriving earlier than expected, a CIR (co-rotating interaction region) hit Earth's magnetic field on June 13th, sparking a G2-class geomanetic storm. The storm is still underway now, and there is a chance it could intensify to category G3 (Strong). High latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroras. Aurora alerts: SMS Text

Jessica Fridrich witnessed the glow of the CIR's impact from Binghamton, New York:

"I was shooting this surprise G2 storm under truly horrendous conditions: thick smoke from wildfires, haze, and high cirrus clouds. Despite the adversity, the solar wind did its jjob well and fired up auroras over upstate New York around 11 pm local time," says Fridrich.

CIRs are transition zones between fast- and slow-moving streams of solar wind. They're a bit like like mini-CMEs. They contain shock waves and enhanced magnetic fields that do a good job sparking geomagnetic storms. This particular CIR is powered by a large southern hole in the sun's atmosphere, which is contributing fast solar wind to the fast-slow transition zone.

Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
Free: Spaceweather.com Newsletter

THIS IS *REAL* MONEY FROM SPACE: On July 16, 1969, the world watched as a Saturn V rocket launched Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon. Exactly 55 years later, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched the US Mint's limited edition Saturn V dollar coin to the stratosphere:

This is real money. You can have a single coin for $49.95 or an entire unbroken roll for $299.95. No longer available from the US Mint, these rare coins flew 121,665 feet above the Sierra Nevada on July 16, 2024. One side shows the mighty Saturn V rocket blasting off from Cape Canaveral; the other side features the Statue of Liberty in profile.

The students are selling space coins to support to support their cosmic ray research program. (Helium is expensive!) Each order comes with a greeting card showing the coins in flight and telling the story of their journey to the stratosphere and back again.

Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education

A HIDDEN WORLD OF SOLAR ACTIVITY: In the 17th century when Anton van Leeuwenhoek looked through a microscope and saw bacteria for the first time, he revealed a new "world of the small" and forever upended the field of biology. Is the same thing about to happen to solar physics?

Maybe. A paper just published in Nature Astronomy reports a new technology for seeing very small things in the atmosphere of the sun. It's a system of adaptive optics that corrects for turbulence in Earth's atmosphere. A test run in July 2023 on the 1.6 m Goode Solar Telescope in California's Big Bear Lake produced an immediate discovery:

"We became astounded witnesses to a strange, short-lived object," recalls the research team, led by Dirk Schmidt of the NSF National Solar Observatory. "We call it a twisted plasmoid."

The plasmoid is unlike anything seen inside the sun's atmosphere before. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory was observing at the same time and saw nothing. The Big Bear adaptive optics system is so good at correcting turbulent blur, it outperforms space telescopes.

A movie of the plasmoid shows a narrow stream of plasma less than 100 km wide moving like a flagellate under van Leeuwenhoek's microscope. The front of the stream "suddenly stopped and collided with its own rear half," before fading away. Other structures observed by the team may be as narrow as 20 km across.

The 1.6-meter Goode Solar Telescope in Big Bear Lake. The steady temperature of the water surface helps keep the air around the telescope calm

It's not clear whether this is a significant discovery or just something idiosyncratic and weird. We'll soon find out. The researchers plan to install the same system on the giant Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, where adaptive optics on its 4-meter mirror could reveal an even greater menagerie. Let the plasmoid hunt begin!