The Earth Caused Auroras on the Sun?!?

I didn't know this was possible, but thanks to Space.com for an article with lots of information on Earth/Sun physics (and links) have a crude understanding.  

You probably know the basics of how a CME interacts with Earth. The solar wind reaches earth, compressing and distorting the electromagnetic shield of the magnetosphere. It's not unlike a bow shock wave as a boat pushes into the water in front of it. 

On April 24, 2023, however, something peculiar happened. This is when a surge of charged particles blasted from the sun and lit up skies as far south as Arizona and Arkansas as well as parts of Australia and New Zealand. Unconventionally, these particles momentarily switched off our planet's bow shock, an anomaly that opened up a "two-way highway" through which charged particles also flew from Earth to the sun, where they sparked a solar light show. Compared to the sun's brightness, however, those auroras were likely far too dim to see.

"Particles trapped by Earth's magnetism suddenly had an escape — a direct path to the sun!" NASA posted last week on social media.

The "highway" was created largely due to a plasma-rich component of the solar wind called a coronal mass ejection (CME), which typically travels faster than the speed at which magnetic waves known as Alfvén waves move through plasma. That speed is known as the Alfvén speed.

But during the April solar eruption, NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft recorded the latter to be faster, which caused the bow shock to temporarily disappear. It was by Alfvén "wings" that magnetically connected our planet to the portion of the sun that had recently erupted, NASA said.

NASA went on to say that the spacecraft's instruments recorded plasma spewing from our planet into the sun for about two hours. "The data revealed unprecedented insights about the sun-Earth connection." Nobody was there at the sun to record what the auroras looked like, but probably couldn't have seen them anyway with incredible amounts of light present. Not to mention being instantly incinerated (I know; fly at night).

The story links to the original paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, and the entire article appears to be readable there. It's titled, "Earth's Alfvén Wings Driven by the April 2023 Coronal Mass Ejection" and is by a large team so Chen et al is probably how it will be referred to.

At this point, I'd love to have a perfect illustration to put here. Many of you are going to be thinking this even before I say it, but magnetic fields and things like Alfvén wings are terribly hard to do drawings of because magnetic fields are inherently three dimensional and depicting real fields in two dimensional drawings (or on computer monitors) can be tricky. One of the figures in Chen et al's paper shows the Alfvén wings this way:

Earth is barely noticeable in the center of green curves, as a gray sphere. I'm not as clear on the other descriptions there, in particular the dawn and dusk portion of the wings' names. The few modeled field lines are red for the wings pointing toward the sun, blue for pointing to the Earth (from the sun) and green appears to be field lines originating from and terminating on the Earth.