Solar Flares Are Exploding Off The Sun This Week

The sun is restless this week.

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The sun is in a volatile place this week and it also happens to be staring right at us as it continues to blow off steam, or rather, plasma.

On Wednesday, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center recorded at least eight M-class solar flares, peaking at an M6.3. The medium-intensity flares blasted large explosions of charged particles from the surface of our sun out into the solar system at the speed of light.

The flares reached Earth in a matter of minutes where they were largely absorbed by our planet’s magnetosphere, but gave a boost to auroras near the poles and caused some brief radio blackouts for pilots, mariners and others using short-wave radios.

But the potential remains particularly high on Thursday for the sun to send some trouble in our direction in the form of a flare, a coronal mass ejection (CMEs), or both.

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There are currently 11 large, visible sunspots on the surface of the sun facing Earth. In most cases it’s these spots of magneto-energetic instability that are responsible for flares and the CMEs that often issue forth into the cosmos with them.

NOAA says there is a 75 percent chance of more M-flares Thursday and a 15 percent chance of powerful X-flares. It’s the X-class flares that can begin to cause trouble on the surface of the Earth by disrupting communications and the power grid. We’ve seen massive blackouts attributed to X-flares in the not-too-distant past.

And today we’re actually more vulnerable than at any point in our history to solar flares, even M-flares that have historically warranted little more reaction than a yawn.

Electronics in space are vulnerable to damage from solar flares since they don’t enjoy as much protection from Earth’s magnetic field as we have on the surface. That’s bad news for astronauts and spacecraft. Earlier this year, a long duration geomagnetic storm caused by persistent M-class flaring essentially fried some of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.

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While flares reach us in minutes, it’s the CMEs that can often cause the most disruption, and they travel much slower. A CME will typically take a day or two to reach Earth, and a CME is more directional than a flare that just radiates out into space in multiple directions. CMEs are ejected out of the sun’s corona all the time, but in directions that completely miss Earth.

It can also take a little while to assess if there indeed were CMEs associated with particular flares. It appears, so far, that any CMEs from Wednesday will probably miss Earth, according to astronomer Dr. Tony Phillips at Spaceweather.com.

But one of the most unstable sunspots on the face of the Sun, Phillips notes, is currently facing Earth, so it’s worth staying on elevated alert this week.

Already we’ve seen at least four more M-flares on Thursday morning.

While it’s been over two months since we’ve seen the last X-flare from the sun, the chances will likely increase as we ramp towards the peak of the solar cycle over the next few years.

The sun goes through a roughly 11-year cycle of peak sunspot and flare activity, followed by a corresponding period of calm. We’re currently entering what we can expect to be the most turbulent and active part of the latest cycle.