The Sun erupted late on 22 January 2012 with an M8.7 class flare, an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME), and a burst of fast moving, highly energetic protons known as a "solar energetic particle" event.

The latter has caused the strongest solar radiation storm since September 2005, according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Centre.

Nasa's Goddard Space Weather Centre’s models predict that the CME is moving at almost 2 300 km/s.

The Coronal Mass Ejection is expected to arrive today, 24 January, at 9 AM ET (14:00 GMT), plus or minus 7 hours.

This has the potential to provide good auroral displays, possibly at lower latitudes than normal.

According to NOAA physicist, and reported by Popular Mechanics USA, when the Coronal Mass Ejection hits us, the wave of charged particles is expected to start a geomagnetic storm, screwing up the earth’s magnetic field for a few hours and potentially affecting technologies like GPS and the electric grid that rely on our magnetic field keeping a nice, steady profile. Luckily, this CME is expected to be more of glancing blow to the northern hemisphere than a direct hit.

NOAA has a scale for geomagnetic storms that ranges from 1, the most minor, to 5, the most serious. The one that will hit today is expected to be around a 2 or 3.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the flare, which began at 10:38 pm ET on 22 January, peaked at 10:59 pm and ended at 11:34 pm. The flare is shown in this video in teal, as that is the colour typically used to show light in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, a wavelength in which it is easy to view solar flares: