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A solar flare measured at X8.7 on the strength scale just emerged from AR 3664, the sunspot region responsible for last weekend's solar storms that sparked vivid auroras.That's the most powerful solar flare of the current cycle, absolutely the most powerful since 2017, and comfortably within the top 20 solar flares ever measured.As AR 3664 made its way toward the edge of the Sun's disk, it wasn't just the X8.7 flare on May 14 that erupted from the solar limb. On May 15, an X3.4 flare followed suit, suggesting that the giant sunspot region is going to continue its party...

A powerful solar storm will make the northern lights visible to most of America — including the New York City area — Friday night, but you’ll need to get out of the city if you want a chance at seeing the auroras. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has upgraded the looming geomagnetic solar storm to a level 4, which is capable of disrupting America’s electrical grid and making the northern lights visible as far south as Alabama. The key to witnessing the natural phenomena will depend on the amount of cloud coverage and light population, making upstate New...

'NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC)- a division of the National Weather Service - is monitoring the sun following a series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that began on May 8,' the emergency alert read. 'Space weather forecasters have issued a Severe (G4) Geomagnetic Storm Watch for the evening of Friday. 'Additional solar eruptions could cause geomagnetic storm conditions to persist through the weekend,' it went on, before describing the abnormal activity that tipped space specialists off. 'A large sunspot cluster has produced several moderate to strong solar flares since Wednesday at 5:00 am ET,' it read....

"This was a powerful blast - More info to come on what sort of impact we should expect here on earth! This marks the 4th X-flare since May 3rd (X1.6, X1.2, X1.2, X4.5), making AR3663 the most active sunspot of Solar Cycle 25 so far."

The solar flare is the most powerful eruption from sunspot region R3654 yet. Last night (April 30), the sun released an extremely powerful solar flare triggering widespread radio blackouts across the Pacific region. The flare peaked at 7:46 p.m. EDT (2346 GMT) and ended shortly after at 7:58 p.m. EDT (2358). Solar flares are eruptions from the sun's surface that emit intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. They are created when magnetic energy builds up in the solar atmosphere and is released. Solar flares are categorized by size into lettered groups, with X-class being the most powerful. Then there are M-class...

On June 20, 2013, an area on the Sun’s surface erupted, sending out a coronal mass ejection (CME) that propelled billions of tons of charged particles into space. The storm reached Earth about two days later. Most of us didn’t even notice. We were busy watching the Miami Heat beat San Antonio Spurs, 95-88 in Game Seven of the NBA Finals. If we weren’t into basketball, we may have been surprised to hear that Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) had became the Senate’s third Republican to publicly endorse same-sex marriage. Behind our backs, the Sun was churning out a storm of...

Tens of thousands of AT&T customers were left without service for hours on Thursday for their home phone, internet and mobile phone services, according to Downdetector. The outages started popping up just before 3:30 a.m. ET, according to a graph shown on the website that tracks outages. Just before 2 p.m. ET, the number of reports had declined drastically to nearly 4,900 after spiking at more than 73,000 just after 9 a.m. ET. Most users still impacted, 51%, say they are having issues with mobile phone service. Forty percent of customers currently reporting being affected say they have no signal...

A massive solar flare exploded from the sun today, the largest of three X-class flares that have impacted Earth in the last 24 hours, and the most intense flare of the current solar cycle. Due to this event, there are significant high-frequency radio black-outs today and it is likely geomagnetic storm conditions will be likely around Earth in the coming days. This most recent X class flare is rated as a X 6.3. It generated an R3 radio blackout, which is considered “strong” on a 5-point scale, where R1 is “minor” with weak or minor degradation of HF radio communications...

(NEXSTAR) — A massive solar flare — the largest in years — was spotted on the sun on New Year’s Eve, sparking a warning to some high-frequency radio users. In an update Sunday evening, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) released an image of the flare, which appeared as a large, glowing spot on the sun. You can see that image below. “A flare is an eruption of energy from the sun that generally lasts minutes to hours,” the SWPC explains. This one in particular, which peaked just before 5 p.m. ET on Sunday, was categorized as an X5 flare....

Huge 'sunspot archipelago' 15 times wider than Earth is spotted on the Sun - and scientists warn it could bombard our planet with solar flares capable of causing devastating blackouts Spots on sun described as 'archipelago' as they look like a collection of islands These planet-sized dark spots can release charged particles that hit the Earth By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE PUBLISHED: 07:46 EST, 22 November 2023 | UPDATED: 07:46 EST, 22 November 2023 e-mail 34 shares 22 View comments They look like small dots of pepper on a tasty egg yolk, or an 'archipelago' – a big group of...

Though you can’t tell it with the unaided eye from here, the sun is incredibly active. A massive nuclear reaction hurtling through space, sometimes it and its sunspots are more active, meaning they emit more heat and radiation, and sometimes they are less active. Further, it can let fly with plasma, superheated matter, that distorts Earth’s magnetic field and can destroy electronics. That sun activity, called Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), is incredibly dangerous for electronics, many of which are quite fragile and, in the case of infrastructure, expensive and difficult to replace. That’s because the electric charge created by the...

Evidence of the most powerful solar storm in history has been uncovered in an unlikely place: within the rings of a tree. This immensely powerful solar storm is thought to have been at least 10 times as powerful as the Carrington Event of 1859, which caused chaos in the rudimentary telegraph system of the time. The researchers found a strange spike in radiocarbon within the rings of subfossilized trees dating to around 14,300 years ago. "Fusa Miyake discovered a sudden and unexpected spike in radiocarbon levels in a Japanese tree from 774 AD. Initially, this was thought to have been...

Experts have warned that the dark region, which is cooler than the surrounding area, could release energetic explosions capable of knocking out our planet's power grids. The exact measurements of the sunspot are unknown, but NASA's Perseverance rover snapped images of the spot as it sits more than 152 million miles from the sun. The rover observed the sunspot on August 17 through August 20 while exploring the Jezero Crater on the Red Planet.

A powerful solar flare disrupted radio and navigation signals across North America. on Monday (Aug. 7) and prompted space weather forecasters to issue warnings because of energetic particles hitting Earth. The flare, classified as an X1.5, was the 20th X flare — the most potent solar flare category — of the current 11-year solar cycle, which will reach its maximum next year.

"Taking some dippy course is not going to change a hardened racist," one plaintiff saysTwo California doctors and a nonprofit filed a lawsuitopens in a new tab or window against top officials of the Medical Board of California (MBC) Tuesday to block a state requirement that implicit bias training be included within continuing medical education (CME) course work required for license renewal every 2 years. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, seeks a permanent injunction to stop the board from implementing legislationopens in a new tab or window that took effect 17...

Tiny spheres of once-molten metal magnetically dredged from the seafloor could be pieces from IM1, a potential interstellar meteor that struck Earth in 2014 Over the past two weeks, I have circumnavigated the globe by land, air and sea. The reason? A kitchen sink–sized chunk of interstellar material that my colleagues and I believe collided with the Earth at 100,000 miles per hour nearly a decade ago. After years of effort, we may have finally found pieces of this elusive object on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, about a mile beneath the waves. The story began In April 2019,...

In November 2021, the Parker Solar Probe skimmed within a more-than-hair-singeing 8.5 million kilometers (5.3 million miles) of the Sun, a feat enabling it to detect the fine structure of the solar wind as it gusted tons of charged particles out into the Solar System through a hole in the Sun's corona, or atmosphere.The probe's readings give us the closest look yet at how the fast solar wind is generated, suggesting that a specific type of magnetic reconnection is what drives this powerful force of nature, according to a team of physicists led by Stuart Bale of the University of...

Filaments In Space - MeerKAT data of the orientations of all the filaments, color-coded with position angles. (Farhad Yusef-Zadeh/Northwestern University) *********************************************************** An investigation into the mystery filaments hanging in space around the heart of the Milky Way has turned up an entirely new population of them, aligned along the galactic plane and pointing in the direction of the galactic center. The magnetized strands are likely the remnants of an outflow from the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* interacting with the surrounding gas a few million years ago, says astrophysicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University. Although Sgr A* is pretty quiet...

Scientists reveal the potential for massive, and potentially destructive, eruptions from the sun. On May 1, 2019, the star next door erupted. In a matter of seconds, Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun, got thousands of times brighter than usual — up to 14,000 times brighter in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum. The radiation burst was strong enough to split any water molecules that might exist on the temperate, Earth-sized planet orbiting that star; repeated blasts of that magnitude might have stripped the planet of any atmosphere. It would be bad news if the Earth’s sun ever...

Exit, Lori Lightfoot; enter, Brandon Johnson — and the song remains the same. Or does it?It’s hard to imagine conditions in Chicago getting more desperate than under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, but new Mayor Brandon Johnson — in office less than a week, as I write — is already doing his damnedest to make everyday life and business survival in one of the country’s most iconic cities even worse.But imagine, we must.As reported by The New York Post, the iconic Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) opened in 1898, only 27 years after the infamous Great Chicago Fire. Proud Chicagoans heralded the...