Michigan Could Get Blasted With A 600,000 Mile-Wide Solar Eruption Today

All throughout West Michigan, police and Consumers Energy are doing the best they can to not only get power back up to those who lost it during the incredibly damaging storms we had the night of May 15, but also to survey the damage that was done.

Throughout the night, reports were coming in from multiple places in West Michigan, where tornadoes had been confirmed on the ground. We do know that there are many power outages, and there’s a lot of debris scattered throughout many cities.

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But it’s not just tornado wind and hail damage that Michigan has to worry about, but now we may have to worry about getting hit with a 600,000-mile-wide Birdwing solar eruption, according to astronomers.

This large wing of solar material has scientists concerned that part of this eruption could hit Earth on May 16, and Michigan may be in the crosshairs. But what kind of damage could something like this do to our atmosphere?

According to Jake Foster, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, it has the ability to do some major damage, as the Daily Mail in the UK reported:

These eruptions are huge collections of high energy solar particles, so when they hit the Earth’s atmosphere they can cause a few different effects. With enough energy, they have the potential to cause a geomagnetic storm, temporarily blocking out radio communications and satellite navigation in certain areas.

This coronal mass ejection is basically a giant wave of plasma and magnetic fields that gets launched into space pretty regularly.