Powerful X-class solar flare triggers Earth-bound CME, aurora displays expected for July 4

On the final day of June, the sun released an X1.1-class solar flare — one of its most powerful expressions — sending a coronal mass ejection hurtling toward Earth on a path timed, almost poetically, to arrive over the American Independence Day weekend. The resulting geomagnetic disturbance, forecast at G2 intensity, may draw the aurora borealis down from its polar home and into the skies above the northern United States, where millions will already be looking up. It is a reminder that the spectacle humans arrange for themselves is sometimes quietly upstaged by the star that makes their world