The sun blasted out a superpowerful X-class flare on Friday afternoon (March 3), and a NASA spacecraft captured footage of the dramatic occasion.
The solar flare — an intense burst of high-energy radiation — erupted Friday at 12:52 p.m. EST (1752 GMT). It registered as an X2.1, NASA officials said (opens in new tab), that means it was notably intense. (Photo voltaic scientists categorize potent flares into three classes, with C being the weakest, M being medium-strength and X essentially the most highly effective.)
The ability of Friday’s flare is on full show in footage captured by NASA’s Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which has been learning the sun intimately since 2010.
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Radiation from the flare, which erupted from a sunspot known as AR 3234, brought about a shortwave radio blackout over North and South America, according to SpaceWeather.com (opens in new tab).
“Aviators and ham radio operators might have seen lack of sign and different uncommon propagation results at frequencies under 30 MHz for as a lot as an hour after the flare,” the outlet wrote.
Highly effective flares are sometimes accompanied by coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which ship large clouds of solar plasma rocketing into space at tens of millions of miles per hour. These clouds can spawn geomagnetic storms right here on Earth, which in flip can have an effect on energy grids and orbiting spacecraft, in addition to supercharge our planet’s auroral displays.
It is unclear in the mean time if a CME did erupt in live performance with Friday’s X2.1 flare, or if that CME can be headed towards Earth. (A few of these plasma clouds miss our planet.)
Friday’s flare did not come out of the blue: The sun has been extraordinarily energetic recently, firing off quite a lot of sturdy flares and CMEs.
For instance, solar outbursts triggered sturdy geomagnetic storms in the previous few days of February. These storms ramped up auroras, dazzling skywatchers around the world.
These dancing atmospheric mild reveals, that are normally confined to very excessive latitudes, had been noticed as removed from the poles as California’s Demise Valley and Perth, the capital of Western Australia.
Photo voltaic exercise waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle. Earth’s star is clearly in an energetic phase of the present cycle in the mean time, so we needs to be looking out for extra outbursts.
Mike Wall is the writer of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a guide in regards to the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) and on Facebook (opens in new tab).
