The previous days, after being a spacial part of one of the largest sun explosions of the decade, scientists around the world gathered to start a game predicting shows of  northern lights.( much the same as predicting the weather)

☀SOLAR STORMS ☀

[reminder]

Halloween Storms 2003

–ONGOING–

Jan. 22, 2012 – Over the weekend, the Earth’s magnetic field was struck by a coronal mass ejection (CME). The CME — a vast bubble of solar plasma that had erupted from the sun on Jan. 19 — took longer than expected to travel through interplanetary space, but on Sunday it made contact.

[Bjørn Jørgensen]

Jan. 23, 2012 — Serious sun explosions, the most powerful kind(X-flare),  focussed everyones attention leading to really big bets.

Jan. 24, 2012 –The promised aurora came at last, and hit Earth magnetic field.. creating some of the most beautiful auroras ever captured! [exact time of hit was a bit unexpected..10 min difference to the expected.. big payouts avoided]

[Göran Strand]

Northern lights travel over the sky with more than 500 miles per second. It lights up everything around us, and all snow was completely green. Fantastic night.

[Chad Blakley]

Jan. 25, 2012 –

-33 degrees celsius, lots of snow on the trees and great auroras. Can a night become better? The first show around 8 pm was great. Then nothing and nothing, just cold feets. But suddendly around 11 pm there was a second even larger show of dancing auroras. It became a late night…

[Peter Rogen]

—^—

Keeping on.. we may be protected from sun radiation due to our magnetic field.. but Mars has an atmosphere 100-times thinner than Earth’s and doesn’t possess a global magnetic field. When the CME hits Mars, it will experience an increase in radiation on the surface and may even have some of its atmosphere removed completely!

COM’ ON YOU SCIENTISTS..PLACE YOUR BETS ;)