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On Sunday, July 2, a giant sunspot exploded, creating a powerful solar flare that hit Earth’s atmosphere and caused radio blackout in parts of the United States and
On Sunday, July 2, a giant sunspot exploded, creating a powerful solar flare that hit Earth’s atmosphere and caused radio blackout in parts of the United States and the Pacific Ocean.
The solar flare was reported to originate from sunspot AR3354, seven times the width of Earth. The flare, which erupted at 3:14 p.m. EDT (1914 GMT) on the Sun, was detected as a bright ultraviolet flash by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). It was classified as an X flare, the most powerful type of solar flare in existence.
space weather.com reported that radiation from the flare ionized Earth’s upper atmosphere, resulting in a deep shortwave radio dimming that lasted about 30 minutes over the western United States and over the Pacific Ocean. Solar physicist Kate Strong shared stunning images of the flare on Twitter, writing: “X SHINES CONTINUE!!! Sunspot region AR3354 near the northwest rim has just produced an X1.07 flare (this solar cycle is between the 10th and 14th largest ever). This is the 18th X flare during SC25 (25th solar cycle, current solar cycle).”
Strong also noted on Twitter that June 2023 marks the highest average monthly number of sunspots in the 21st century. Solar physicist in a separate tweet WroteJune 2023, “HIGHEST MONTHLY AVERAGE SUNSPOT SINCE SEPTEMBER 2002!
Solar flares occur when magnetic fields around sunspots become entangled, fragmented, and then reconnected in a process called reconnection. These images of this flare seem to indicate that a cloud of plasma was assisted by causing the magnetized material to fall on sunspot AR3354.
Flashes are grouped according to their strength; the smallest flashes are called B flashes, followed by C flashes, and then M flashes. The strongest class of solar flares are X-ray bursts, such as those seen with AR3354 on Sunday.
Classes of solar flares increase in roughly the same magnitude as earthquakes on the Richter scale. This means that a class X torch is ten times more powerful than a class M torch and 1000 times more powerful than a class B torch.
Prolonged flares like this are sometimes accompanied by coronal mass ejections (CMEs); In these events, magnetic fields eject large amounts of stellar matter, such as plasma ejected from the Sun. Although Sunday’s X flare was long enough to cause a CVM, solar observatories have yet to observe the significant plasma outburst associated with the flare or the AR3354 sunspot.
Source: Port Altele
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