A series of solar storms lit up the night’s sky around the world over the weekend, producing awe-inspiring aurora borealis (and australis) displays — which may not be over yet. But the storms also hit GPS satellites that help power farming tractors used for precise seed planting.

The issues appear to have begun as early as Friday, according to one John Deere equipment dealership in the midwest, earlier reported on by 404 Media. The dealership, called Landmark Implement, posted to its site that GPS-guided planting systems were not performing as expected. It noted that the technological challenges were hitting «all brands of GPS.»

«We are in search of a tool to help predict this in the future so that we can attempt to give our customers an alert that this issue may be coming,» the dealership wrote. «We do believe this is a historic event and it isn’t something that we are going to have to continue to battle frequently.»

The ongoing impacts of the geomagnetic storms underscore how important technology such as GPS has become in the two decades since the last major solar events. Over the past decade in particular, industries including farming have begun adopting these technologies in broad ways, including for precision planting using self-driving tractors.

Read more: John Deere Breaks New Ground with Self-Driving Tractors You Can Control From a Phone

While the impacts are dramatic, they were expected. Governments and companies around the globe have been working to improve the constellation of satellites that power our modern-day GPS. 

In the US, the military’s Space Force has been working to upgrade to a new technology called GPS III, which features better accuracy and better anti-jamming capabilities. That’s in addition to the roughly $2 billion per year Washington spends to keep GPS up and running. GPS III satellites are expected to be operating sometime in 2026 (PDF).

In the meantime, the geomagnetic storms are expected to continue throughout this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a statement. The storm, which the agency said has caused «power grid irregularities» in addition to communications issues, likely won’t be as strong as those on May 10-11.

On Friday and Saturday nights, viewers from San Francisco to Tasmania were treated to amazing auroras in the night sky. One of the biggest geomagnetic storms in decades may continue tonight and even through the week, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

«At least five Earth-directed coronal mass ejections were observed and expected to arrive as early as midday Friday, May 10, 2024, and persist through Sunday, May 12, 2024,» the center noted. «Several strong flares have been observed over the past few days and were associated with a large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster, which is 16 times the diameter of Earth.»

In most cases, geomagnetic storms cause little to no disruption on Earth, with radio communications and satellites affected most often. In extreme cases, a geomagnetic storm can cause significant and potentially life-threatening power outages, as well as problems with satellite systems and radio communications.

«Geomagnetic storms can impact infrastructure in near-Earth orbit and on Earth’s surface, potentially disrupting communications, the electric power grid, navigation, radio and satellite operations,» NOAA said, adding that representatives of the center have notified the operators of these systems so they can take protective action. 

The Washington Post notes that «anyone using high-frequency radio in the aurora viewing zone may experience some disruptions,» but also reports that most people will not be affected or need to take any special precautions beyond those they’d take with any storm that could knock out power.

Since consumer wireless networks use different radio frequencies, CNN notes that your phone is unlikely to be affected. Severe geomagnetic storms could affect the power grid, but wireless carriers generally have backups and can deploy mobile cellular towers.

In most cases, geomagnetic storms also present unique opportunities to see auroras in the night sky. When the storms hit, the plasma they carry creates a jaw-dropping aurora, illuminating the night sky with brilliant colors. Those auroras can be especially pronounced during the most intense phases of the storm, making for nice stargazing.

Where can you see these aurora borealis light shows?

«Geomagnetic storms can also trigger spectacular displays of aurora on Earth,» the NOAA said. «A severe geomagnetic storm includes the potential for aurora to be seen as far south as Alabama and Northern California.»

NOAA has created some (experimental) viewlines for watching the auroras, as well as a 30-minute aurora forecast that shows the last 24 hours of activity.

Does it seem like you can never see a hyped aurora where you live? Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, talked to CNET about this very issue back in 2022. Murtagh compared it to a popular outdoor hobby that also takes a lot of patience — fishing.

«You might be out hunting it for hours on end,» he told me, «and then, the perfect storm of events comes along, and you finally see it.»

He also noted that city dwellers are at a disadvantage due to light pollution, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, the brightening of the night sky in the city, caused by streetlights and other sources. That inhibits our ability to see stars and planets.

But say you get in the car and drive out of your city or suburb to a rural area with no streetlights. There’s another element that’s out of your control — the weather. Cloudy conditions can roll over any state at any time, making aurora sightings even tougher to predict.

Many people travel to Alaska or northern countries just in the hope of seeing, and photographing, an aurora. Murtagh recommended Anchorage, Fairbanks, Yukon, Helsinki and northern Scandinavia. There are even trip planners now who organize tours around hoping to see the aurora.

Black holes, those mysterious places in space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape, make for great movie plot twists. But Hollywood aside, there are many things humans don’t understand about a black hole. A new video from NASA attempts to show what it looks like when an object crosses the event horizon, or boundary, of a black hole. Since no technology can survive this experience, this might be as close as we’re ever going to get.

The video, created by NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman and Brian Powell, begins with a camera view floating toward a black hole. As the camera approaches, it orbits around the black hole before the camera flies into the burning gas that surrounds it. It delivers a great view of some photon rings before entering the event horizon. From there, the camera experiences the stretching and distortion that’s colorfully known as spaghettification, as it’s pulled into the black hole. As the camera is sucked in, the simulated sky shrinks. Moments later, the camera goes dark as it hits the singularity, the one-dimensional center of a black hole, where the laws of physics cease to exist.

The simulation then plays again, but with explanations overlaid to explain each step of the process. The video then replays a third time, now in slow motion, and zoomed in to show the intricacies of the photon ring layers. It ends with a final replay of the whole simulation but this time with more technical details about how it was created. In all, the simulation is much more detailed than the images we have of the Milky Way’s black hole. 

It’s quite the trip, and produces some truly striking images, especially those of the photon ring layers and the sky rapidly shrinking as the camera is pulled in. 

Schnittman also made a second video with a simulation of the camera making a couple of orbits around the black hole before safely escaping. That one is a 360-degree YouTube video, allowing viewers to look around and see the entire trip from multiple angles. 

The simulated black hole is enormous

The black hole in the simulation measures about 16 million miles (25 million kilometers) in diameter. That’s way bigger than Earth, and comparable to some black holes in our own cosmic backyard.

In case you, too, want to go flying into a black hole, Schnittman has some advice. 

«If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole,» he said. «Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, possess much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can rip apart approaching objects before they get to the horizon.»

In short, if you opted for a small black hole in this hypothetical situation, you might be torn to bits before you got to the good stuff. Supermassive black holes seem to be the way to go.

Thanks, NASA’s Discover supercomputer

The simulation was created using NASA’s Discover supercomputer, which is located at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation in Greenbelt, Maryland. The project generated approximately 10 terabytes of data, which NASA says is equivalent to roughly half the estimated text content in the Library of Congress. 

It took about five days to complete and used just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. NASA says the same work would’ve taken about a decade on a regular laptop. 

Why work on such a huge and comprehensive simulation of a black hole? Schnittman says it’s mostly for research.

«People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,» Schnittman said in a post on NASA’s site. «So I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.»