A dark sunspot looking directly at the Earth doubled in size in just a 24-hour period and could possibly send out middle-class flares in the near future.
SpaceWeather.com author Tony Phillips wrote on Wednesday: “Yesterday, the AR3038 sunspot was big. It’s huge today.
And now it is said to measure three times the size of the Earth.
The AR30398 sunspot not only looks directly at our planet, but also has an unstable beta-gamma magnetic field that harbors enough energy to cause brief radio outages.
A dark sunspot looking directly at the Earth doubled in size in just a 24-hour period and could possibly send out middle-class flares in the near future. SpaceWeather.com author Tony Phillips wrote Wednesday: “Yesterday, the AR3038 sunspot was big. It’s huge today.”
Sunspots are dark regions of the Sun where it is cooler than other parts of the surface. Solar flares originate near these dark areas of the star.
Solar flares and coronal mass ejections come from these regions, and when they explode toward Earth, they can cause geomagnetic storms that produce beautiful auroras, as well as pose a danger to electrical networks and satellites.
The AR3038 is certainly a big sunspot – a New Jersey beach fan saw it in the sun as it came out over the Atlantic Ocean.
A pair of swarms of massive sunspots, some large enough to devour the entire Earth, appeared on the surface of the sun in April.
The AR30398 sunspot not only looks directly at our planet, but also has an unstable beta-gamma magnetic field that harbors enough energy to cause brief radio outages.
Named AR2993 and AR2994, the two active regions sent scientists into excess to find out if the Earth should be prepared for powerful solar flares, but fortunately none were sent.
However, in early April the Earth nearly lost a plasma ejection, linked to a group of sunspots that had previously appeared in the star.
The recent increase in the activity of the Sun is the result of its arrival towards the most active phase of its 11-year solar cycle, reaching its maximum activity in 2024.
Studies have shown that the level of solar activity that is currently happening is about the same as 11 years ago, during the same time of the last cycle.
“I’m sure we’ll see larger active regions over the next few years,” according to NASA solar physicist Dean Pesnell, speaking to Live Science.
“Active regions 2993 and 2994 are medium in size and do not represent the best that the solar cycle 25 can produce.”
Jan Janssens of the Center for Solar and Terrestrial Excellence in Brussels told Live Science that multiple solar flares and coronal mass ejections are “typical at this stage of the solar cycle”, with some targeting towards the Earth, but which are lost.
A pair of swarms of massive sunspots, some large enough to devour the entire Earth, appeared on the surface of the sun in April.
“As the solar cycle reaches its peak, regions of increasingly complex sunspots become visible, which can cause solar flares.”
Solar flares have letter classes, with class A being the weakest, followed by class B, C, and class M, with class X being the strongest of the categories. They are then given a size: small numbers represent smaller flares within the class.
An X1 flare is ten times less powerful than the strongest possible solar flame, and the most powerful ever recorded, since 2003, has overflowed the sensors like an X28.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Forecast Center found that Sunday’s blaze caused a breakdown of certain radio frequencies below 30 MHz in Southeast Asia and Australia.
Although the flare caused a radio shutdown, the flare’s plasma will not reach Earth.
“Flares and coronal mass ejections will be more frequent over the next few years, increasing the level of danger from solar activity,” Pesnell told Live Science.
There has been no CME or extreme solar flare in the modern world (the last was the Carrington event in 1859) which created a geomagnetic storm with aurora appearing all over the world, as well as fires at telegraph stations. .