Active October Sun Releases X-Class Flare

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Brighter than a shimmering ghost, faster than the flick of a black cat’s tail, the Sun cast a spell in our direction, just in time for Halloween. This imagery captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory covers a busy few days of activity between Oct. 25-28 that ended with a significant solar flare. From late afternoon Oct. 25 through mid-morning Oct. 26, an active region on the left limb of the Sun flickered with a series of small flares and petal-like eruptions of solar material. Meanwhile, the Sun was sporting more active regions at its lower center, directly facing Earth. On Oct. 28, the biggest of these released a significant flare, which peaked at 11:35 a.m. EDT. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This flare was classified as an X1-class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, and so on. Flares that are classified X10 or stronger are considered unusually intense. This was the second X-class flare of Solar Cycle 25, which began in Dec. 2019. A new solar cycle comes roughly every 11 years. Over the course of each cycle, the Sun transitions from relatively calm to active and stormy,

Published 2021-10-29 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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