Intense solar flare bursts from sun’s surface, impacts radio signals

As astronomers were studying two particular solar flares, a third erupted, further informing scientists how these phenomena originate. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured the striking images. Karen Fox, for NASA said,”This flare came from an area of complex magnetic activity on the sun – known as an active region, and in this case labeled Active Region 2529 – which has sported a large dark spot, called a sunspot, over the past several days. This sunspot has changed shape and size as it slowly made its way across the sun’s face.”

Solar flares are powerful emissions from the sun’s surface. Some of them are strong, they reach the Earth’s atmosphere and interact with its magnetic field creating waves of light at the north and south poles.

But astronomers are perplexed at what causes them. The widely held theory is a process called magnetic reconnection, where magnetic energy is converted to light. High-resolution images caught in 2015  revealed details of a magnetic wave leading to the novel theory. The images are also considered the most detailed of their kind researchers observe.

Astronomers earlier witnessed an eruption in 2013 of coronal rain, a phenomenon where hot plasma in the sun’s corona cools and condenses into strong magnetic fields, usually associated with solar flares.

Ju Jing, a physics researcher from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), said, “We can now observe in very fine detail how energy is transported in solar flares, in this case from the corona where it has been stored to the lower chromosphere tens of thousands of miles below it, where most of the energy is finally converted into heat and radiated away.”

A major event occurred on April 17 when a sunspot five times the Earth’s size created an enormous solar flare. Only a mid-sized flare, designated as M6.7, was nearly 10 percent as intense as the most vigorous variety, X-class flares. Yet it was strong enough for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to release a moderate radio blackout”warning. The incident, however, won’t have a dramatic effect on our planet.

The report was published in Tech Times.