Over the past few weeks, the Sun has seen several fairly powerful eruptions. On March 12, the Solar Tracking Spacecraft recorded the ejection of a large amount of material from the far side of the Sun as a result of the coronal mass ejection. It was detected as an expanding cloud or halo of solar debris and receded from the Sun at an extremely high speed of 2,127 kilometers (1,321 miles) per second. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections are nothing new, but this one was special.

Normally reverse eruptions do not tend to hit the Earth as they are directed in the opposite direction; but it was so intense that satellites orbiting our planet picked up a signal of particles accelerated by the shock wave of the explosion right into our corner of space.

It may seem like the sun has fallen into some shenanigans lately, and it did. It’s heading towards the climax of its cycle, a roughly 11-year cycle in which the Sun’s activity peaks and declines. We’re probably heading towards a solar maximum in the next year or two, when the Sun is most active, brimming with sunspots and exploding in powerful flares.

These cycles are associated with the Sun’s magnetic field, which reverses the poles every 11 years, but scientists are still trying to understand why this happens. This polarity change occurs at solar maximum; The magnetic field at the poles weakens to zero, then reappears with the opposite pole. North becomes south, south becomes north.

At this time, sunspots appear in large numbers. These are temporary points on the Sun with stronger magnetic fields, and their lines often become entangled, refracted, and recombined. When this happens, a large amount of energy is released in the form of solar flares. Sometimes they can cause coronal mass ejections, in which tons of material and magnetic fields are ejected from the Sun into space. At the time of this writing, the Sun currently has about 100 sunspots, some of which are divided into sunspot regions. Some sunspot regions may exist for a long time, flashing repeatedly before disappearing from sight as the Sun rotates.

In the days leading up to the last CME – given the unusual R-type designation for rare formations – a particularly active sunspot region was orbiting the far side of the Sun. Before it disappeared on March 4, the region designated AR3234 emitted 49 C-class flares, 12 M-class flares, and 1 X-class flares (in order of magnitude), the most powerful type of explosion our Sun can make. It is unknown whether AR3234 is responsible for the R-type flare; This is absolutely reasonable. But scientists definitely want to know more about him.

Fortunately, the Parker Solar Probe was in the firing line for CME. Parker sent the signals back to Earth, telling his engineers that their systems were on par; now we have to wait for the next Parker data load to read the flash measurements. This will happen after March 17, when the probe should make a close flyby of the Sun.

In the meantime, we can hope for the European Southern Observatory’s Solar Orbiter (capturing a powerful coronal mass ejection to earth) alongside other solar observatories like NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Last year, a significant amount of event data was also collected.