Bengaluru:

A powerful solar storm impacted Earth in early May 2024, triggered by the highly active region AR13664 in the Sun, ISRO said on Tuesday.

This region unleashed a series of X-class flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) directed at Earth.

According to ISRO, the resulting geomagnetic storm was the most intense since 2003, causing disruptions to communication and GPS systems.

“This is the biggest geomagnetic storm since 2003 in terms of its strength, as the flaring region on the Sun was as big as the historically important Carrington event that took place in 1859,” ISRO said in a statement.

Multiple X-class flares and CMEs have hit the Earth in the past few days, the space agency said.

“This (CME) had severe effects over high latitudes where trans-polar flights are already being reported to get diverted. More events are expected in the next few days,” ISRO noted.

The space agency said that the Indian sector got less affected as the main event of the storm happened in the early morning of May 11, when the ionosphere had not developed fully.

Also, being at lower latitudes, widespread outages haven’t been reported in India.

The Ionosphere was very turbulent over the Pacific and American sectors, ISRO said.

The Ionosphere is part of the Earth’s upper atmosphere, between 80 and about 600 km where extreme ultraviolet and x-ray solar radiation ionises the atoms and molecules, thus creating a layer of electrons.

The ionosphere is important because it reflects and modifies radio waves used for communication and navigation.

The main punch of this event so far arrived in the early morning hours of May 11 in India, when the Ionosphere was not fully developed, ISRO said.

ISRO said it has mobilised all its observation platforms and systems to record the signatures of this event. Both Aditya-L1 and Chandrayaan-2 have made observations and signatures have been analysed.

“The ASPEX payload on-board Aditya-L1 is showing high speed solar wind, high temperature solar wind plasma and energetic ion flux till now,” the space agency said. PTI GMS ANE

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American space agency NASA gave a platform to an independent committee looking into the reported sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), in which the researchers said that they did not find any proof that aliens were responsible for the phenomenon. However, the agency also said that it cannot rule out that possibility. The 36-page report presented on Thursday offers no conclusive evidence about aliens but outlines how NASA will investigate the phenomenon (called UAPs or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) with improved technology and artificial intelligence.

Do aliens exist?

The report observes that “there is no reason to conclude that existing UAP reports have an extraterrestrial source”. However, the last page of the report adds that it is possible that the objects could have travelled through our solar system to get here. “If we recognise the plausibility of any of these, then we should recognise that all are at least plausible,” the report said not denying the possibility of “potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth’s atmosphere”.

What about previous UFO sightings?

The inquiry concluded that many sightings have been explained by planes, drones, balloons or meteorological circumstances in the past. A January report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the US revealed that most of the 510 UFO sightings were decidedly not aliens, “however scores of other strange sightings still have no official explanation”. It said that UAP still poses a threat even if they are not extraterrestrial advanced technology.

The report added that in order to reach a “definitive, scientific conclusion” about the origin of UFOs, NASA lacks sufficient high-quality evidence. However, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson still believes that there is life beyond Earth. “If you ask me, do I believe there’s life in a universe that is so vast that it’s hard for me to comprehend how big it is? My personal answer is yes. It would have to be a very advanced civilization (but) the distances is light years, hundreds of lights, billions of light years away.”

Limited Data

The study asserted that given the data limitations, the sightings of UFO’s “cannot be immediately identified as known human-made or natural phenomena.” Dr Nicola Fox, NASA’s Associate Administrator said that the agency “needs to find a rocky planet around a hospitable star that isn’t too violent, that is in just that right place that has signatures of water and signatures of carbon. So, the building blocks of life, and we continue to strive to do that.”

“The limitation on this data is that at any given time most of the Earth’s surface is not covered by commercial satellites at high resolution – for a particular UAP event, we will need to be fortunate to obtain high-resolution observations from space,” she said.

Appointment Of UFO Research Director

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that a new director for UAP research will be appointed by the organisation. However, the new executive’s identity has not yet been made public since they have been receiving online threats regarding their work. According to Dr Fox,  the new director will serve as a focal point for bringing together communications, resources and data analytic skills in the US government’s efforts to recognise and understand UAP.