Analysts were still trying to fathom the impact of a massive solar storm that hit Earth early Thursday which had the potential to affect power grids, airplane routes and space-based satellite navigation systems. Early reports say the impact was weaker than anticipated but the intensity of the storm could pick up. The storm, a big cloud of charged particles flung from the Sun at about 4.5 million miles per hour (7.2 million km per hour), was spawned by a pair of solar flares, scientists said. This is probably the strongest such event in nearly six years, and is likely more intense than a similar storm in late January, said Joseph Kunches, a space weather specialist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dr. Hassan Basorrah, astronomy professor at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, said that for the past 30 years the King Abdul Aziz Observatory has tracked solar activity and found that it reaches a maximum every 11 years and will peak in 2013. He said we can see some spots on the sun with the naked eye during sunset. These spots, he said, are huge and will produce more expulsions during the next few days. Safety precautions were taken all over the world. US airlines diverted long-haul flights that pass near the North Pole because of the risk posed by the intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation at high latitudes, the British newspaper The Independent reported. The shock wave could also disrupt the earth's magnetic field, compressing it on the day side and extending outward on the night side, scientists said. The stream of charged particles ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere was triggered by two giant solar flares that erupted an hour apart Tuesday, scientists said. Space storms are not new. The first major solar flare was recorded by British astronomer Richard Carrington in 1859. Other solar geomagnetic storms have been observed in recent decades. One huge solar flare in 1972 cut off long-distance telephone communication in the midwestern state of Illinois, NASA said. – With agencies __
