'Severe geomagnetic storm watch' - the first in nearly 20 years - is issued ... trends now
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Feds are forecasting that an uncommonly powerful solar storm will occur in outer space Friday - potentially affecting millions of Americans.
The 'unusual event', as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put it in an emergency bulletin Thursday, would be the first in nearly 20 years if it comes to fruition.
It follows a series of solar flares that began on Wednesday, during which several large expulsions of plasma from the Sun's corona - the outermost part of its atmosphere - were spotted.
That paved the way for the alert for Friday, where officials said the expulsions of matter and magnetic field could cause geomagnetic storms and problems for earthlings.
Those storms could cause electronic devices like GPS and parts of power grids to malfunction, they warned - while citing how it may drape a huge portion of the country in a spectacular circle of light stretching from California to Alabama.
A solar or geomagnetic storm is a major disturbance of Earth's magnetosphere - the area around Earth controlled by the planet's magnetic field - often caused by CMEs. Pictured, a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun, as captured by NASA's Solar
