Elijah Williams
The giant solar explosions of energy and light are not over yet. Officials said Tuesday that the sun had just emitted another big solar flare – and which is the strongest so far in the current solar cycle.
The latest explosion peaked just before 1 p.m. ET, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center said, with a Class X rating of X8.7. X-class solar flares are the strongest, described by NASA as “gigantic explosions in the sun that send energy, light and high-speed particles into space.” The center said the explosion was an R3 or “strong” explosion, meaning it could have caused wide-area blackouts of high-frequency radio communications for about of an hour on the sunlit side of Earth may also have caused low-frequency navigation signal problems during the same period of time.
“Eruptions of this magnitude are not frequent,” the center said in its update, also posting on social media: “Region 3664 is not yet completed!”
The flare came from the sunspot called 3664. That spot, combined with region 3663, forms a cluster “much larger than Earth,” NOAA said last week. And as of last Thursday, 3664 just continued “to grow and increase in magnetic complexity and has evolved into a greater threat of increased risk of solar flare.”
Two other flags – classified as X1.7 and X1.2 – also erupted shortly beforealthough they were also not expected to be linked to any major impacts on Earth.
Despite the intensity of the explosion, officials said there is still no concern about a coronal mass ejection or a large explosion of solar plasma and magnetic field. These CMEs are what lead to geomagnetic storms like this one. rare extreme storm that occurred over the weekend, sending the Northern Lights to latitudes much lower than normal and causing chaos for GPS systems that farmers depend on at the height of the planting season.
“Due to its location, any CME associated with this outbreak probably not have any geomagnetic impacts on Earth,” said the Space Weather Prediction Center.
Earth is currently in Solar Cycle 25, which began in 2020. The last cycle maintained an average length of 11 years and was the weakest solar cycle to occur in a century, the National Weather Service said. Although the current cycle is predicted to be quite weak and similar to the previous one, NOAA officials have seen “a steady increase in sunspot activity” since the beginning.
“Although we are not predicting a particularly active Solar Cycle 25, violent flares from the Sun could occur at any time,” said Doug Biesecker, a solar physicist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, in 2020.
Li Cohen
