No (sigh) HAARP didn't cause the May auroras; that's a solar storm | Fact check

Joedy McCreary, USA TODAY
Updated ·5 min read

The claim: HAARP caused May 2024 geomagnetic storms because solar flares aren’t real

A May 10 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) claims the northern lights that captivated much of the globe in May had nothing to do with radiation from the sun.

“Solar flares don't exist because the Sun isn't a ball of fire in space that throws off violent bursts of energy,” the post’s caption reads. “The Sun is just a light. The 'geomagnetic storms’ are caused by HAARP. Stop falling for the nonsense.”

The post was shared more than 800 times in four days.

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Our rating: False

Solar flares exist, as established by more than 150 years of scientific research. Multiple experts said the auroras widely visible across the globe in May were caused by solar storms – not HAARP, which does not produce nearly enough energy to create one.

Claim ‘total and utter nonsense’

For three nights in mid-May, nighttime skies as far south as Florida and the Bahamas lit up in the colorful green and purple hues of auroras.

But the Facebook post gets their cause wrong. They were the product of geomagnetic storms stemming from the strongest solar storm in more than two decades. They were not a creation of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks that researches Earth’s ionosphere and is the subject of widespread debunked conspiracy theories.

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The claim is “total and utter nonsense,” Scott McIntosh, the deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told USA TODAY in an email.

One type of solar storm is a solar flare, an intense burst of high-energy radiation emitted from the sun at the speed of light that takes about eight minutes to reach the Earth. Those flares were first observed in 1859 when British astronomer Richard Carrington timed the transit of sunspots across the solar surface. The Carrington Event helped other scientists connect flares to communications disruptions and the aurora borealis.

Those flares can cause the sun to shoot bursts of billions of tons of plasma along with charged particles in what are known as coronal mass ejections. If they reach Earth, they can interact with the atmosphere to cause geomagnetic storms and create auroras like those viewed across the globe in mid-May.

“Think of a cannon. When the cannon shoots off, there’s a great flash. That's the solar flare," said Bryan Brasher, a project manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

"The flash goes out 360 degrees in all directions," he added, comparing a coronal mass ejection to a cannonball that is "very directional."

Auroras ‘in no way linked’ to HAARP experiments

The auroral display first appeared during the final day that HAARP conducted experiments studying space debris in orbit.

Program officials said that was a coincidence, noting the study was scheduled March 16, more than a month before the Space Weather Prediction Center issued its first storm watch.

“The HAARP scientific experiments were in no way linked to the solar storm or high auroral activity seen around the globe,” HAARP director Jessica Matthews said in a statement.

A previous HAARP project resulted in an artificial airglow visible 300 miles from its facility in Gakona, Alaska. But that’s not the same thing as an aurora. The project mimicked one by using high-frequency radio pulses to interact with electrons in the ionosphere. HAARP does not generate nearly enough energy to produce a real aurora, which is created when solar emissions interact with Earth’s magnetic field. Officials say it would take 10 billion years to generate enough power for that.

The post also includes an image consisting of two photos of the sun, each split in half and placed side-by-side, with one purported to be a fabrication. Both are authentic images that show different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, experts said.

The photo on the left shows the visible light emitted by the sun’s surface. The fiery image wrongly identified as "fake" captures the ultraviolet radiation emitted from a different layer of the sun’s atmosphere called the chromosphere, said Ryan French, a solar physicist from the National Science Foundation’s National Solar Observatory who has written a book about the sun.

“The chromosphere is not CGI,” he told USA TODAY in an email.

French said the post does get one thing right: the sun is not a ball of fire. Rather, it consists of super-hot ionized gas called plasma.

USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook user who shared the post but did not immediately receive a response.

PolitiFact debunked a version of the claim.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: HAARP didn't cause northern lights. Solar storms did | Fact check