The sun has unleashed its most powerful solar flare for around seven years.
Last week, in less than 24 hours, the sun fired off three X-class solar flares, the highest magnitude on the scale used to measure the intensity of flares. The third was the strongest of the bunch and was “the most powerful flare since the great solar storms of September 2017,” SpaceWeather.com explained on its website.
According to Space.com, the X6.3 class solar flare is the most powerful of the current solar cycle, designated solar cycle 25. The flare reached its peak activity at 5:34 p.m. EST (2234 GMT) on Thursday (Feb. 22), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This was the third solar flare in a 24-hour period from an active solar region on the sun known as AR 3590.
Previously, an X1.8-class flare blasted out of this giant sunspot region at 6:07 p.m. EST (2307 GMT) on Wednesday (Feb. 21), and an X1.7-class flare occurred earlier on Thursday at 1:32 a.m. EST (0632 GMT).
Solar flares of this magnitude can temporarily disrupt high-frequency radio signals on Earth, but NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center debunked any speculation that the flares were related to the cell phone outages reported across the United States on Thursday.
“While solar flares can affect communication systems, radar, and the Global Positioning System, based on the intensity of the eruption and associated phenomena, it is highly unlikely that these flares contributed to the widely reported cellular network outages,” the SWPC said in a statement on Thursday.
Despite the intensity of the recent activity on the sun, it is unlikely that the X-class flares will result in outbursts of the aurora on Earth. For the aurora to form on Earth, solar flares need to hurl massive clouds of charged particles, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), toward the planet. No significant CMEs were detected from the triplet of solar flares.
The region of the sun that sparked the tremendous solar flares could generate more in the coming days, meaning there is still a chance of an aurora-inducing event to unfold in the heavens.
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