The Earth is currently being battered by a storm of charged particles from the Sun, which could disrupt power grids, satellite navigation and plane routes.
The storm - the largest in five years - will bombard the Earth's magnetic field throughout Thursday.
It was triggered by a pair of solar flares - the largest of their kind - earlier this week.
As a result, the Northern Lights may be visible at lower latitudes.
The effects will be most intense in polar regions, and aircraft may be advised to change their routings to avoid these areas.
The Sun's activity rises and falls through an 11-year cycle, and has in recent months been seen to launch more of the solar flares that are causing the current storm.
The cycle is due to peak in 2013.
The flares have resulted in what is known as a coronal mass ejection, "the technical term for what is really just a big ball of gas travelling at 2,000 kilometres per second", according to Doug Biesiecker from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
The incoming cloud of charged particles could affect satellites and will launch a geomagnetic storm in the Earth's protective magnetic field, Mr Beisiecker told the BBC.
"This magnetic field keeps harmful radiation out. Now, the geomagnetic storm isn't going to take that magnetic field away from the Earth, but... it's going to shake it.
"And if you shake a magnetic field you generate things like electric currents in the atmosphere and say, in the power grid that criss-crosses pretty much every country on the planet now."
1 - Solar flare and erruption. 2 - Billions of tonnes of superhot gas containig charged particles is released. 3 - Particles drawn to poles collide with atmosphere causing polar lights.
Many storms are benign; this storm could enable skywatchers to see the northern lights from parts of the northern US and
northern UK.
Nicholas Stavrakis told Algoa FM that the solar storm "is part of an 11 year cycle of solar maxima. It will last for another 18 months (on and off). On the plus side we could see the Southern Lights as far north as Port Elizabeth so look south over the next few weeks."
But the strongest storms can have other, more significant effects.
In 1972, a geomagnetic storm provoked by a solar flare knocked out long-distance telephone communication across the US state of Illinois.
And in 1989, another disturbance plunged six million people into darkness across the Canadian province of Quebec.
There are concerns over the potential communication problems for aircraft and disruption to GPS signals caused by current solar activity.
Take a closer look at the flare that erupted on March 6, 2012
This movie of the March 6, 2012 X5.4 flare was captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in the 171 and 131 Angstrom wavelength. One of the most dramatic features is the way the entire surface of the sun seems to ripple with the force of the eruption. This movement comes from something called EIT waves -- because they were first discovered with the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) on the Solar Heliospheric Observatory.
Since SDO captures images every 12 seconds, it has been able to map the full evolution of these waves and confirm that they can travel across the full breadth of the sun. The waves move at over a million miles per hour, zipping from one side of the sun to the other in about an hour. The movie shows two distinct waves. The first seems to spread in all directions; the second is narrower, moving toward the southeast. Such waves are associated with, and perhaps trigger, fast coronal mass ejections, so it is likely that each one is connected to one of the two CMEs that erupted on March 6.
Source: bbc.co.uk and NASAexplorer
