By Xeno
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, our nearest star put on a show that won’t be forgotten for a long, long time. Under the ever-watchful eyes of an armada of solar observatories, the sun unleashed an M2-class solar flare.
Keep in mind that an M2 flare, although powerful, is still only classed as a “medium” explosion. But there was nothing medium about this event.
Erupting from an active region of sunspots (sunspot complex 1226-1227) — where highly stressed and concentrated magnetic fields are forced through the solar surface (the “photosphere”), pushing the hot plasma aside, exposing the cooler plasma below the surface — the flare ejected a huge coronal mass ejection (CME).
A surprisingly large quantity of plasma didn’t... More...
