Two spacecraft witness long-duration flare eruptions on the sun’s surface

First reported by Space.com, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory witnessed the incident in a variety of wavelengths. The flare is categorized as M3.4 (middle class) but is strong enough to cause temporary radio blackouts in the Asia-Pacific region.

For the unconscious, solar flares are divided into three categories – C, M and X with C being the weakest and X being the strongest and most impactful.

The recent incident has also been linked to a coronal mass ejection (CME) – a large cloud of superheated plasma that shoots out from the sun’s surface at extreme speeds. It was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory as well as the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (NASA/ESA probe sent in 1995).

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What’s surprising is that the two spacecraft are complementary, despite their different orbits. For the unconscious, SOHO orbits the sun at Lagrange Point 1 – a stable point of gravity in space about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth toward the Sun.

What are solar flares and CMEs?

According to NASA, a solar flare is a burst of intense radiation that comes from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. These are considered some of the largest explosive events in our solar system. It’s basically a giant burst of X-rays and energy that travels at the speed of light across all directions in the solar system.

Coronal Mass Ejections or CMEs on the other hand, are clouds of large particles that are pushed out into space from the Sun’s atmosphere. The sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, consists of a strong magnetic field. In places where this field is closed, the sun’s atmosphere can spontaneously release gas bubbles and a magnetic field, which is called a coronal mass ejection.

CMEs can contain a billion tons of matter and can be expelled at several million miles per hour in a huge explosion. The explosion is capable of creating an impact on any planet or spacecraft in its path. They arrive on Earth in about two to three days, but only when the clouds point toward Earth during the explosion.

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