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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...

(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.

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...

A planet sized hole has ripped through the surface of the sun letting out intense 1.8 million mph winds which could threaten our entire planet by the end of the week. The gaping hole, which stretches 20 times the size of the Earth, is the second to appear in a week and has sent solar winds hurling towards our planet within the next 24 hours. If the winds make impact with our planet, the Earth’s magnetic field, satellites, and most technologies would cease to work leading to a potential worldwide power cut. The first hole appeared March 23, and triggered...

“We only have 12 years to save the planet,” we may hear. “Man may only have 10 years left if we don’t ________” (fill in the doomsayer prescription). The truth, though, is that we don’t know if humanity has still one year or six months — or less. And this reality was brought home by something that occurred March 12. It was on that day, not two weeks ago, that there was a huge solar eruption. It was perhaps 100 times more powerful than the Carrington Event in 1859, which rendered inoperable a good part of the “Victorian Internet”: telegraph...

A huge solar storm will strike Earth on Thursday, potentially disrupting power grids and pushing the aurora as far south as Michigan and Maine. Alerts issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration early Thursday morning ranked as a K-5 index (out of 9). A ranking of five or above is needed for the administration to issue an alert for upcoming solar storms. Minor impacts to satellites, power grid fluctuations and a visible aurora were noted by NOAA. The highest geomagnetic storm category predicted thus far is a G2 storm on Feb. 18, which is considered “moderate” by NOAA’s rating...

The Sun has always fascinated astronomers. And now, a new development has baffled scientists. A huge part of the Sun broke off of its surface and created a tornado-like swirl around its North Pole. Though scientists are trying to analyse how this occurred, the video of the development has stunned the space community.

For all that the Sun is a ubiquitous and vital part of our lives, a lot about it remains baffling. And now it's done something decidedly peculiar. Material from a filament of plasma erupting from the Sun's surface broke away and appeared to form a crown-like vortex over the solar north pole. Further analysis will be required to determine whether or not this is what actually occurred. For now, scientists are saying that they've not quite seen anything like it – and the footage itself is undoubtedly spectacular. olar shenanigans are not entirely unexpected currently. Our star is ramping up...

A huge filament of solar plasma has broken off the sun's surface and is circling its north pole like a vortex of powerful winds, but scientists have no clue what caused it. Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com that while he has never seen a vortex like this, something odd is happening at the sun's 55 degree latitudes with clockwork regularity once every solar cycle, the 11-year period characterized by an ebb and flow in the generation of sunspots and eruptions. The prominence...that McIntosh describes as...

Billions of light years away, there is a giant ball of hot gas that is brighter than hundreds of billions of suns. It is hard to imagine something so bright. So what is it? Astronomers are not really sure, but they have a couple theories. They think it may be a very rare type of supernova — called a magnetar — but one so powerful that it pushes the energy limits of physics, or in other words, the most powerful supernova ever seen as of today. This object is so luminous that astronomers are having a really difficult time finding...

More than 2,600 years ago, strange red clouds over Mesopotamia drew the attention of soothsayers across the land. Their royal reports have now helped confine the date of a severe solar storm that washed over the planet. Based on readings of carbon isotopes trapped in tree rings deposited around that time, astronomers already suspected there was a period of intense solar activity around the middle of the 7th century BC... And it seemed like it had pretty far-ranging effects. Earlier in the year, geologists reported similar signs of a storm from around this period in traces of radioactive particles buried...

X1.9 Solar Flare January 9 2023 An X1.9 class solar flare flashes on the left edge of the Sun on January 9, 2023. This image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and shows a blend of light from the 171, 131, and 304 angstrom wavelengths. Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO ******************************************************** The Sun emitted a strong solar flare, peaking at 1:50 p.m. EST on January 9, 2023. Imagery of the event was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which constantly watches the Sun. Solar flares are intense explosions of energy that can disrupt radio communications, damage power grids, and affect navigation signals....