The biggest heavenly has just got heated and heated.
Scientist has announced a historic astronomical events, the Sun has just erupted the biggest flare for more than a decade.
After 12 years, the sun has just intensified in an absolutely massive solar flare, so big that it knocked out radio comms here on Earth.
The astronomical observers said that the Sun has spat out two X-class flares, on the morning of 6 September EDT.
These are the biggest class of solar flare there is, and the largest explosions in our solar system, with loops of plasma tens of times the size of the Earth.
The first one came in at X2.2 at 5.10am EDT. Then, just a few hours later at 8.03am, it dropped an absolutely monster X9.3 flare, the largest since 2005.
According to experts report, both flares erupted from an active region called AR 2673, which also produced an M-class flare a few days ago. Of the two sunspot regions currently active, both flares came from the smaller – a size of just 7 Earths by 9 Earths.
Also, this solar cycle, the sun’s 11-year periodic activity cycle, began in 2008. It has been unusually quiet, with very low sunspot activity.
Although we are heading into solar minimum, the quietest period of the cycle, activity can like solar flares still occur.
As others don’t know, solar flare activity has interesting effects on Earth. This one knocked out high-frequency radio, according to the NOAA, and degraded low-frequency navigation.
Furthermore, particles from the CME can also cause aurora activity as they interact with Earth’s magnetosphere, so keep your eyes on the skies. They should be arriving within a few days.
It can be remembered that the most recent X9 flare took place in 2006, at X9.0.
In 2005, a massive X17 flare erupted. The biggest solar flare of all time was a humungous X28 back in 2003, which luckily was at an oblique angle to Earth, so we managed to avoid the full brunt.
The activity has resulted to overload all NASA’s solar sensors.
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