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The solar flare is the most powerful eruption from sunspot region R3654 yet. Last night (April 30), the sun released an extremely powerful solar flare triggering widespread radio blackouts across the Pacific region. The flare peaked at 7:46 p.m. EDT (2346 GMT) and ended shortly after at 7:58 p.m. EDT (2358). Solar flares are eruptions from the sun's surface that emit intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. They are created when magnetic energy builds up in the solar atmosphere and is released. Solar flares are categorized by size into lettered groups, with X-class being the most powerful. Then there are M-class...

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...

Tens of thousands of AT&T customers were left without service for hours on Thursday for their home phone, internet and mobile phone services, according to Downdetector. The outages started popping up just before 3:30 a.m. ET, according to a graph shown on the website that tracks outages. Just before 2 p.m. ET, the number of reports had declined drastically to nearly 4,900 after spiking at more than 73,000 just after 9 a.m. ET. Most users still impacted, 51%, say they are having issues with mobile phone service. Forty percent of customers currently reporting being affected say they have no signal...

A massive solar flare exploded from the sun today, the largest of three X-class flares that have impacted Earth in the last 24 hours, and the most intense flare of the current solar cycle. Due to this event, there are significant high-frequency radio black-outs today and it is likely geomagnetic storm conditions will be likely around Earth in the coming days. This most recent X class flare is rated as a X 6.3. It generated an R3 radio blackout, which is considered “strong” on a 5-point scale, where R1 is “minor” with weak or minor degradation of HF radio communications...

(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.

"Taking some dippy course is not going to change a hardened racist," one plaintiff saysTwo California doctors and a nonprofit filed a lawsuitopens in a new tab or window against top officials of the Medical Board of California (MBC) Tuesday to block a state requirement that implicit bias training be included within continuing medical education (CME) course work required for license renewal every 2 years. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, seeks a permanent injunction to stop the board from implementing legislationopens in a new tab or window that took effect 17...

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...

Exit, Lori Lightfoot; enter, Brandon Johnson — and the song remains the same. Or does it?It’s hard to imagine conditions in Chicago getting more desperate than under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, but new Mayor Brandon Johnson — in office less than a week, as I write — is already doing his damnedest to make everyday life and business survival in one of the country’s most iconic cities even worse.But imagine, we must.As reported by The New York Post, the iconic Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) opened in 1898, only 27 years after the infamous Great Chicago Fire. Proud Chicagoans heralded the...

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has been operating in the Loop since 1898, just 27 years after the Great Chicago Fire. The exchange was part of the city’s rebirth and helped establish Chicago as a financial hub. Now, we see the opposite of rebirth with Chicago’s population shrinking. And the $66 billion CME may not be around to help with future renewal: The company has rewritten the terms of its lease so it can leave the city if politicians pursue “ill-conceived” public policy. “We’re in a very strong position,” CME CEO Terry Duffy said in a recent interview. “If we...

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 little over a week ago, on Sunday, March 12, a near-catastrophic event occurred that could have wrecked the lives of everyone reading this: A Powerful Solar Eruption on Far Side of Sun Still Impacted Earth. A massive eruption of solar material, known as a coronal mass ejection or CME, was detected escaping from the Sun at 11:36 p.m. EDT on March 12, 2023. The CME erupted from the side of the Sun opposite Earth. This was a replay of the Carrington event of September 1, 1859: Suddenly, [British astronomer Richard Christian] Carrington spotted what he described as “two patches...