Fourth of July celebrations across the United States this weekend could be accompanied by light shows in the night skies, as a string of powerful solar eruptions appear set to strike Earth.

The sun has been especially hyperactive over the past few days — firing off 10 M-class solar flares over 24 hours that have been accompanied by multiple coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are set to slam into Earth on July 3 and July 5.

CMEs are large, fast-moving clouds of magnetized plasma and solar radiation that occasionally get flung into space with solar flares when kinks in the sun's magnetic field snap. If CMEs smash into Earth, they cause disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, called geomagnetic storms, that can trigger partial radio blackouts and produce vibrant aurora displays farther away from Earth's magnetic poles than usual.

"Machine-Gun Sun! More than 5 storms on their way to Earth and 3 of them offer good chances for aurora views," Tamitha Skov, a space weather physicist at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a July 2 post on the social platform X. "NOAA and NASA model predictions do not show all the storms yet (it's hard to keep up with the rapid-fire storm launches!) but the first should hit before noon July 3 UTC."

The CMEs are expected to give a glancing blow to our planet, creating conditions for a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. It's also possible that these storms will strengthen to become strong (G3), depending on how they interact with Earth's magnetic field.

Auroras resulting from G3-class geomagnetic storms are often visible in northern parts of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Maine, according to NOAA. Skywatchers farther south in Oregon, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire will also have a chance of catching the light show. In any case, skywatchers interested in seeing or photographing the auroras will need to get as far from artificial light sources as possible.

The weekend storms might not be the last activity we see from the sun in the coming days, as two gigantic sunspots currently pimpling its face are displaying "beta-gamma-delta" magnetic fields — the most tangled and unstable type. This means these sunspots harbor the potential to launch powerful X-class flares, according to spaceweather.com.

The last few years have seen a record number of powerful X-class flares explode from the sun's surface, hitting Earth with several major solar storms, including 2024's Mother's Day storm. This record comes partly from improvements to scientists' solar monitoring technologies, but also due to the sun reaching its 11-year peak in sunspot production, or solar maximum, in 2024.

Following this peak, the sun has now entered a period known as the "battle zone," a relatively understudied solar phase where instabilities across our star's newly flipped magnetic field ramp up the production of solar holes, gigantic, highly-tangled sunspots and subsequent geomagnetic storms.

The worst-case scenario for a solar storm is a superstorm like the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles set telegraph systems around the world on fire and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.

The Carrington Event unleashed a roughly X45 magnitude solar flare that remains a record, yet it's likely far from the worst the sun can muster — with ancient tree rings harboring evidence of even more powerful blasts that occurred long before humans existed.

A solar eruption has blown a massive hole in the sun's atmosphere, causing temporary radio blackouts and possibly triggering a northern lights display tomorrow.

Scientists recorded an M5.7-class solar flare on Sunday (May 10), which briefly disrupted high-frequency radio communications on the sunlit side of our planet, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. M-class solar flares are the second strongest category of solar eruption, after X-class flares.

Solar flares are sudden bursts of electromagnetic radiation ejected from the sun. This energy travels at the speed of light, so by the time scientists observe them, they're already here. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from the flares' harmful radiation, but they can disrupt radio communications traveling through the upper atmosphere, as well as satellites and spacecraft, according to NASA.

The eruption also produced a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a slower-moving cloud of solar plasma and radiation — that can trigger geomagnetic storms and aurora displays. There's no guarantee that the CME will hit Earth, but we could take a glancing blow, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.

"Modeling of the resulting CME indicates that a bulk of the material should pass well behind Earth's orbit," a spokesperson for the Space Weather Prediction Center wrote in an update published Monday (May 11). "That being said, a glancing blow and or shock arrival by late on 12 May into the early portions of the 13th … can not be ruled out."

Will there be auroras?

A glancing blow could produce a minor G1 geomagnetic storm, according to the U.K.'s Met Office. The geomagnetic storm scale ranges from G1 to G5, with G5 being the most severe. However, G1 storms can still result in visible auroras in places like northern Michigan and Maine, weak power grid fluctuations and minor impacts on satellite operations and migratory animals, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.

Our sun has been very active in recent years after reaching solar maximum — the peak of the sun's roughly 11-year activity cycle. The solar maximum likely ended sometime in early 2025, so solar activity is, in theory, declining. Solar flares of a 5.7 magnitude aren't uncommon in and around a solar maximum, when there are more sunspots to unleash solar flares and CMEs.

The sunspot that produced the solar flare, designated sunspot 4436, has been very active in recent days. Last week, the same sunspot ejected at least 5 CMEs while it was on the far side of the sun, Spaceweather.com reported. More explosions in the coming days could result in other CMEs striking Earth and more intense geomagnetic storms.

Auroras appear in the sky when charged particles from the sun hit Earth's upper atmosphere, colliding with oxygen and nitrogen particles. These particles then glow different colors as they shed energy from the collision, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Oxygen gives off the greens and reds in the auroras, while nitrogen gives off the blue and purple colored light, according to NASA.

Solar flares often disrupt Earth's upper atmosphere and help power stunning auroras. Now, scientists suggest those same bursts of solar energy might also influence earthquakes.

When a solar flare erupts toward our planet, it can subtly rearrange charged particles in Earth's ionosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere filled with electrically charged gas. In a new study, the researchers suggest that those changes may slightly alter the electrical forces within Earth's crust and affect the stability of faults where earthquakes can occur.

If this connection can be proved, it would link space weather to earthquake risk in a way scientists don't currently account for. But other researchers cautioned that the model used in the study, published Feb. 3 in the International Journal of Plasma Environmental Science and Technology, is overly simplified, and that real-world geology may dampen the effect to nearly nothing.

A planet-sized electrical circuit

Our planet is buzzing with naturally generated electricity. In particular, highly stressed cracks in Earth's crust contain pockets of water that is so hot and pressurized it is neither liquid nor gas. This supercritical fluid is teeming with charged ions, meaning the cracks behave like a capacitor, storing electrical energy.

These cracks in the crust, or faults, are also key regions that trigger earthquakes, because they mark where tectonic plates collide and move, building up mechanical energy that can result in quakes.

In the new study, the researchers created a model that treated Earth's crust and the ionosphere — a charged layer 250 miles (402 kilometers) above Earth — as two ends of a giant, leaky battery.

They then connected the crust "capacitor" to the ionosphere with an electrical field.

The scientists used their to model predict that when a solar flare's electrically charged particles hit Earth, they shift electrons in the ionosphere downward, which concentrates them at lower altitudes, forming a layer of negative charge. This charge, in turn, increases the electrostatic force acting upon the charges in Earth's crust, producing pressure changes, the model showed. The researchers argue that these pressure changes are comparable to other forces that affect fault stability, like gravity or tides.

Essentially, the increase in electrostatic force in the crust translates to more pressure exertion on the surrounding crust, nudging a fault to move and result in an earthquake.

Hard to test

The researchers suggest that the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake in Japan supports their model's findings, as the quake overlapped with strong solar flare activity. However, validating a crust-to-ionosphere connection is difficult in practice.

For one thing, the U.S. Geological Survey has long emphasized that earthquakes do not follow the sun's 11-year solar cycle in any clear, repeating way.

There's also a coincidence problem. Solar flares and earthquakes are rather common, so by chance there will be some overlap between the two types of event, even if they don't necessarily influence each other.

Other researchers noted that the study's model does not reflect the full complexities of Earth's crust.

"The proposed model is greatly simplified," said Victor Novikov, a geophysicist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in the study. He added that the researchers did not fully account for many rock layers' resistance to conducting electricity, which could suppress the electric field before it contributes to a quake. "Observational results do not support the proposed idea," Novikov told Live Science in an email.

Despite this, researchers continue to search for a link between space weather and plate tectonics, however subtle it may be.

For now, the study is best viewed as a proposed pathway that could be tested with better observations and deeper analysis, the researchers noted.

Whether the sun can reliably jostle Earth's faults remains an open question and a reminder of a basic scientific rule: Correlation does not equal causation.

What's inside Earth quiz: Test your knowledge of our planet's hidden layers

Update, Feb. 3 at 11 a.m. ET: The monster sunspot region 4366 is now facing Earth, and shows no signs of weakening. It is the most active sunspot of the current solar cycle (cycle 25). NOAA predicts that a glancing blow from a massive CME released toward Earth is likely this week. A minor (G1) geomagnetic storm is predicted to begin on Thursday (Feb. 5), with possible auroras at lower latitudes than usual. Stay tuned for more information.

A monster sunspot has taken aim at Earth after firing off dozens of powerful flares Sunday and Monday (Feb. 1-2) — including the most intense solar eruption in years.

Elevated geomagnetic activity — possibly resulting in vibrant northern lights at lower latitudes than usual — is likely on Thursday (Feb. 5), according to an alert from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). However, it's still too soon to know for certain.

The sunspot, called region 4366, appeared suddenly several days ago and has rapidly grown to roughly half the size of the infamous Carrington Event sunspot, which, in September 1859, fired a flare that triggered the most destructive geomagnetic storm in recorded history. This swift growth has left sunspot 4366 highly unstable; in a 24-hour period between Sunday and Monday, the region erupted with more than 20 solar flares, including at least 23 M-class flares and four X-class flares, the strongest category of solar flare, according to NASA.

This barrage of activity peaked Sunday around 6:57 pm EST, when the sunspot launched a strong X8.1 solar flare, according to the SWPC. This was the single strongest solar flare since October 2024, when the sun launched an X9.0 outburst.

The recent X-class flare immediately triggered partial radio blackouts in the South Pacific, according to Spaceweather.com, and fired a slower-moving blast of plasma called a coronal mass ejection (CME) in Earth's direction. The SWPC predicts that this CME will just miss Earth when it passes by on Feb. 5, but a glancing blow could be possible.

If the CME does clip our planet, charged solar particles will race toward Earth's magnetic poles, resulting in bright auroras.

The sun "wakes up"

Sunspots are vast, dark regions of magnetic instability that form in the sun's lower atmosphere. When the magnetic-field lines near these regions become too tangled, they may violently snap back into alignment, triggering solar flares and CMEs.

Sunspot activity peaks every 11 years, when the sun's magnetic poles flip places during a period called solar maximum. The frequency and intensity of solar flares and CMEs also peak during this turbulent time.

In 2024, NASA confirmed that solar maximum was well underway, with violent space weather likely to remain high through 2026. This could result in extremely rare and widespread auroral displays, like those observed in May 2024, when a monster CME pushed the northern lights as far south as Florida. The sunspot responsible for that storm lingered on the sun for more than three months, firing off nearly 1,000 solar flares in its lifetime, a recent study found.

Intense solar radiation storms can also have adverse consequences, such as radio blackouts, GPS disruptions, and damage to satellites and spacecraft.

The strongest solar flare of 2025 was an X5.1-class eruption recorded in November. Sunspot 4366 already has it beat — but whether it will hang on to break its own record remains to be seen.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Nov. 12 at 11 a.m. after two of the three incoming CMEs hit Earth overnight.

The combined solar outbursts triggered a severe G4 geomagnetic storm, resulting in auroras appearing as far south as Arizona, Mexico, Texas, and Florida.

Conditions have since subsided to G3 (strong) levels, but NOAA predicts that G4 conditions could return tonight following the arrival of the third and strongest CME, which is expected to hit Earth sometime today. Elevated auroral activity is likely to carry over into Thursday (Nov. 13) and Friday (Nov. 14), according to the latest NOAA update.

Three powerful outbursts of solar plasma are barrelling toward Earth, with dazzling auroras possible across the northern half of the United States over the coming nights.

Minor auroral activity is possible at high latitudes tonight (Nov. 11), but Wednesday (Nov. 12) could bring the Northern Lights as far south as northern California and Alabama, according to an alert from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). There could also be a strong showing of auroras on Thursday (Nov. 13), NOAA added, though that forecast may change as more data comes in over the coming days.

The three solar outbursts headed our way — known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — were all launched from a particularly active sunspot called AR4274, which is currently aimed toward Earth. The first two CMEs erupted on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, respectively, and were each triggered by powerful X-class solar flares — the most powerful class of solar flare on NOAA's space weather prediction scale.

These flares were categorized as class X1.7 and X1.2, and the resulting CMEs have a chance to combine with or "cannibalize" each other as they speed toward Earth, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. These first two CMEs are expected to hit sometime tonight.

The third, and most powerful CME, was launched on Tuesday morning following the eruption of a gargantuan X5.1 solar flare — almost five times the intensity of the two preceding flares, and the single strongest solar flare of 2025 so far. The powerful flare triggered radio blackouts over Europe and Africa shortly after it erupted, according to Space.com.

'Severe' storms possible

The monster CME accompanying this flare is predicted to hit Earth sometime on Wednesday (Nov. 12), according to NOAA. Combined with the effects of the two prior outbursts, this could cause serious disturbances to Earth's magnetic field. NOAA predicts the resulting geomagnetic storm could reach "severe" G4 levels — the second highest level on the agency's scale.

Besides plunging the Northern Lights to much lower latitudes than usual, G4-class geomagnetic storms can cause power grid fluctuations, low-frequency radio disturbances, and GPS errors, according to NOAA.

There is nothing that an average person needs to do to prepare for a geomagnetic storm. However, if you wish to go aurora hunting over the coming nights, find a dark sky location as far from artificial lights as possible and allow about 20 minutes for your eyes to adjust. You don't need any special equipment to see the aurora, but the colors can sometimes look even more vibrant through a digital camera or phone screen, as they have a large aperture to let in light.

Solar flares, CMEs, and geomagnetic storms all become more common — and more intense — during solar maximum, the peak of the sun's roughly 11-year activity cycle. Astronomers suspect we are seeing the current solar cycle's maximum play out right now, though the peak of activity may have already occurred last year.

Worrying new simulations show that a solar storm on par with the infamous Carrington Event could potentially wipe out every single satellite orbiting our planet, leaving us in a precarious and expensive predicament. And experts say such a powerful solar storm is inevitable and will hit our planet sooner or later.

On Sept. 1, 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington observed a brilliant flash of light coming from a gigantic sunspot that was about the same size as Jupiter. He had witnessed the most powerful solar flare in recorded history, and it was followed by a major disturbance to Earth's magnetic field, known as a geomagnetic storm, which raged for almost a week and painted the skies with widespread auroras.

Now, a new set of simulations conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA) has revealed that if a similar event occurred today, the effects would be much more catastrophic due to our reliance on technologies — both on Earth and in space.

The simulations were part of a tabletop exercise carried out by researchers from multiple ESA departments at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany. The simulations were in preparation for the upcoming launch of ESA's Sentinel-1D radio imaging satellite, which is currently scheduled for Nov. 4.

In the hypothetical scenario, an X45 magnitude solar flare — around five times more powerful than the most intense solar flare of the current solar cycle — suddenly erupts from the sun, showering Earth with a wave of intense radiation without warning. Around 15 hours later, after another wave of radiation, a gigantic cloud of fast-moving plasma known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), hits our planet at more than 4.4 million mph (7.1 million km/h), triggering a Carrington-like geomagnetic storm.

While the researchers' response to this scenario was focused on how they would protect Sentinel-1D, the simulations also demonstrated how the global constellation of orbiting spacecraft would fare in such an event.

"The immense flow of energy ejected by the sun may cause damage to all our satellites in orbit," Jorge Amaya, ESA's space weather modeling coordinator , said in a statement. "Satellites in low-Earth orbit are typically better protected by our atmosphere and our magnetic field from space hazards, but an explosion of the magnitude of the Carrington Event would leave no spacecraft safe."

In the exercise, there were three main threats that satellites faced. First, the initial wave of radiation from the solar flare, which could permanently or temporarily disable any satellites too far from Earth's inner magnetic field. Second, a follow-up wave of radiation that scrambled navigation systems, increasing the likelihood of collisions. And third, the CME, which caused the upper atmosphere to swell outward as it soaked up the solar storm's energy.

The atmospheric swelling is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this triple threat, as it could increase satellites' drag by up to 400%, pulling the spacecraft down to Earth, where they will either burn up in the atmosphere or crash to the planet's surface.

We got a small taste of what the effects of such an event would be like during the record-breaking geomagnetic storm of May 2024, which was the most powerful of its kind for 21 years and triggered widespread aurora displays.

In addition to knocking a handful of satellites out of low Earth orbit, the 2024 storm significantly disrupted GPS systems, resulting in malfunctioning agricultural machinery that cost U.S. farmers around $500 million.

But that was only a drop in the ocean compared with the costs of a Carrington-like storm. A 2013 study analyzing the possible impact of such an event on North American power grids revealed that the U.S. could incur damages of up to $2.6 trillion, while the Planetary Society noted the true global cost is "beyond the scale of our comprehension."

"When" not "if"

The reason that tabletop exercises like this are important is that another Carrington-like storm may not be far away.

"The key takeaway is that it's not a question of if this will happen but when," Gustavo Baldo Carvalho, a spacecraft operations expert who led the Sentinel-1D simulations, said in the statement.

Experts think that a Carrington-level storm occurs every 500 years on average, putting the odds of such an event occurring this century at around 12%.

While the latest exercise is further proof that we are not currently equipped to deal with this type of extreme scenario, researchers hope that by continually training for this eventuality we will become better able to deal with it.

"Simulating the impact of such [an] event is similar to predicting the effects of a pandemic," Amaya said. "We will feel its real effect on our society only after the event, but we must be ready and have plans in place to react in a moment's notice."

But the longer we have to wait for the next megastorm, the more costly it will become, as the number of satellites orbiting our planet is predicted to rise by at least tenfold by 2050.

The world's largest solar telescope just captured the highest-resolution images of a solar flare to date — and they're spectacular.

Researchers trained the Hawaii-based Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on the final stages of a powerful X-class solar flare on Aug. 8, 2024, capturing detailed images of chaotic loops of plasma at the sun's surface. The observations could help scientists understand the mechanics of solar flares and improve predictions of future flares.

"This is the first time the Inouye Solar Telescope has ever observed an X-class flare," study coauthor Cole Tamburri, a solar physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement. "These flares are among the most energetic events our star produces, and we were fortunate to catch this one under perfect observing conditions."

Solar flares are massive bursts of light emitted by the sun during solar storms. Twisting magnetic fields create large, bundled loops of plasma called arcades that extend into the corona — the hot, outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere. When the magnetic fields get so convoluted that they snap back into place (a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection), the sun blasts particles and energy in the form of solar flares into space. When aimed at Earth, energy from the flares can disrupt radio communications and spacecraft orbiting our planet.

Related: Bottom of the sun becomes visible to humans for the first time in history (photos)

But scientists don't know the size of the plasma loops that make up these arcades. Previous observations of the individual loops have been limited by the resolutions of older solar telescopes.

In a new study, published Aug. 25 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Tamburri and his colleagues collected high-resolution images of plasma loops in the last stages of a powerful solar flare using the Inouye's Visible Broadband Imager instrument. On average, the plasma loops spanned about 30 miles (48 kilometers) wide. But some were smaller, down to about 13 miles (21 km), which is about as small as the telescope can resolve.

"We're finally peering into the spatial scales we've been speculating about for years," Tamburri said in the statement. "This opens the door to studying not just their size, but their shapes, their evolution, and even the scales where magnetic reconnection — the engine behind flares — occurs."

According to the researchers, it's possible that the coronal loops observed here might be the building blocks of larger solar arcades. "If that's the case, we're not just resolving bundles of loops; we're resolving individual loops for the first time," Tamburri said in the statement. "It's like going from seeing a forest to suddenly seeing every single tree."

The new data on coronal loops could help scientists improve models of solar flares and better understand the magnetic field in the corona, the researchers wrote in the study.

"It's a landmark moment in solar science," Tamburri said. "We're finally seeing the sun at the scales it works on."

An astrophotographer has captured a stunning shot of a powerful solar flare photobombing the International Space Station (ISS) as the human-inhabited spacecraft appeared to zoom across the surface of our home star.

Andrew McCarthy (aka Cosmic Background) snapped the incredible image on June 15 from a spot in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. He was initially planning to photograph a standard "transit" photo of the ISS passing directly between Earth and the sun. However, as McCarthy was setting up his camera, he noticed that one sunspot — dubbed AR4114 — had begun to "flare to life," he told Live Science.

Through a mix of skill and luck, McCarthy snapped the space station as it whizzed almost directly past the flaring sunspot, revealing superhot loops of glowing plasma, or solar prominences, moments before they were flung into space by a powerful explosion. Capturing both objects in a single frame makes this a "once-in-a-lifetime" photo, McCarthy wrote on the social platform X.

"Ever since I started chasing ISS [solar] transits, I've dreamed of catching one with an active flare," McCarthy told Live Science in an email. "When I saw the silhouette of the ISS flash through the frame, I knew it was something special."

Being separated from the sun by 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) shielded ISS astronauts from any potentially harmful radiation from the flare. This also makes the space station loom large in the photo. But in reality, the prominences were much larger, stretching up to five times wider than Earth's diameter. "Something about the small human elements against the scale and power of the sun feels like an inspiring scene," McCarthy added.

Related: 'Never been seen before': First images from new ISS solar telescope reveal subtle 'fluctuations' in sun's outer atmosphere

Solar flares are currently exploding from the sun more frequently than usual as the sun nears the end of the most active phase in its roughly 11-year sunspot cycle, known as solar maximum. During this period, magnetic instabilities make it much easier for chunks of plasma to break away from the solar surface.

The flare in the new photo is believed to be a powerful M8.46-magnitude blast that triggered a radio blackout across parts of North America as solar radiation temporarily disrupted the sea of plasma within Earth's ionosphere — the region of the atmosphere more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) above our planet's surface, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Some of the plasma within the prominences also broke away from the sun entirely, forming a magnetized cloud of fast-moving particles known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), which glanced off Earth's magnetic field three days later.

McCarthy named the new photo "Kardashev Dreams" in honor of Nikolai Kardashev, a Soviet astronomer who famously proposed the Kardashev scale, which measures the technological advancement of a planetary civilization based on the amount of energy it can harness.

Photos like these are "a symbol of our first steps into a much larger universe," McCarthy said.

"Difficult" shot

Capturing the striking new photo was "much more difficult than I imagined," McCarthy said; to capture the best view of an ISS solar transit, you need to take the photo around midday, when the sun is directly overhead. And when you are taking the photo in the middle of a desert, as McCarthy did, this becomes very challenging, he added.

"Large telescopes, like the kind I need to use for these [photos], do NOT handle heat very well," McCarthy said. "Components flex and swell in the heat and currents of air of different temperatures swirl in the tube, making it nigh impossible to focus." Electrical components also start to overheat and shut down, he added.

To beat the heat, McCarthy strapped ice packs to the critical components of the camera to stop them from overheating and covered as much of the equipment in reflective foil as possible. "This kept the equipment barely working," he said.

Luckily, all the hard work paid off.

"This was the type of shot I've been chasing for so long, and I'm thrilled to add it to my portfolio," McCarthy said.

Astronomers have captured the first evidence of a "planet with a death wish" — an alien world that's orbiting so close to its star and so fast that it's causing the star to cook it to death with stellar explosions.

The planet, called HIP 67522 b, is a wispy, Jupiter-size planet bound on a tight, seven-day orbit around its host star, HIP 67522.

But these orbits are disturbing the star's magnetic field, causing enormous stellar eruptions to blow back on the planet and make it shrink. This marks the first time a planet has been observed influencing its host star, the scientists reported in a study published July 2 in the journal Nature.

"The planet seems to be triggering particularly energetic flares," study first-author Ekaterina Ilin, an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said in a statement. "The waves it sends along the star's magnetic field lines kick off flares at specific moments. But the energy of the flares is much higher than the energy of the waves. We think that the waves are setting off explosions that are waiting to happen."

Stars are gigantic balls of burning plasma whose charged particles, or ions, swirl over their surfaces to create powerful magnetic fields. Because magnetic-field lines cannot cross each other, sometimes these fields knot before suddenly snapping to launch bursts of radiation called solar flares, which are sometimes accompanied by enormous belches of surface plasma known as coronal mass ejections.

Because many planets, including Earth, have magnetic fields, astronomers have long wondered whether planets with close orbits around their stars could disturb powerful stellar magnetic fields enough to trigger explosions.

Related: James Webb telescope discovers its first planet — a Saturn-size 'shepherd' still glowing red hot from its formation

To investigate this question, the astronomers conducted a broad sweep of stars using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which finds exoplanets by detecting the characteristic dimming of stars' light as planets pass in front of them. After flagging HIP 67522 as worthy of interest, the astronomers used the European Space Agency's (ESA) Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (Cheops) to investigate further.

"We quickly requested observing time with Cheops, which can target individual stars on demand, ultra precisely," Ilin said. "With Cheops we saw more flares, taking the total count to 15, almost all coming in our direction as the planet transited in front of the star as seen from Earth."

A vital piece of evidence was that these flares occurred when the planet passed in front of the star. This suggested that the planet is gathering energy as it orbits and is using it to "whip" the star's magnetic-field lines like a rope. When this shock wave passes down the field to the star's surface, a powerful flare erupts.

These flares are slowly stripping away the planet's diffuse atmosphere, layer by layer. The researchers project that, although HIP 67522 b is as big as Jupiter now, it could shrink to the size of Neptune in the next 100 million years.

To further investigate this first-of-its-kind phenomenon, the researchers plan to take more readings with TESS, Cheops, and other exoplanet telescopes, such as ESA's upcoming Plato space telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2026.

"I have a million questions because this is a completely new phenomenon, so the details are still not clear," Ilin said. "There are two things that I think are most important to do now. The first is to follow up in different wavelengths (Cheops covers visible to near-infrared wavelengths) to find out what kind of energy is being released in these flares — for example ultraviolet and X-rays are especially bad news for the exoplanet.

"The second is to find and study other similar star-planet systems; by moving from a single case to a group of 10-100 systems, theoretical astronomers will have something to work with," she added.

Researchers from Kyushu University in Japan have provided some new insights about the powerful geomagnetic storm that flared up last Mother's Day, after a big solar storm hit Earth.

The work focuses on the storm's activity in a region of Earth's ionosphere called the E layer, which sits in the upper atmosphere about 56 miles to 75 miles (90 to 120 kilometers) above sea level.

"The sporadic E layer hasn't been studied very much during the storm because it appeared unaffected by solar storms," study leader Huixin Liu said in a statement.

"But we wanted to see if something as powerful as the Mother's Day geomagnetic storm did anything to the E layer," Liu added. "What we found was very interesting."

The E layer was significantly enhanced during the storm, the team found; thin patches of high ionization density — known as sporadic E layers, or sporadic Es for short — suddenly appeared in the ionosphere.

To gather data on the phenomena, the team relied on a combination of sources from space and on the ground.

Using the joint U.S.-Taiwanese COSMIC-2 satellite network, as well as 37 ground-based radars called ionosodes, the team gathered a massive amount of information during and after the solar storm to get a global map of sporadic E layer activity.

Related: The US isn't prepared for a big solar storm, exercise finds

"This large amount of data was critical for both detecting the presence of sporadic Es and tracking where they formed as time went by," Liu said.

"In our analysis, we found that sporadic Es formed after the main phase of the solar storm, during what we call the recovery phase," Liu added.

First, the team detected sporadic Es at higher latitudes, around the poles. The phenomena slowly extended toward the equator over time. "This propagation characteristic from high to low latitudes suggests that sporadic E layers are most likely caused by the disturbed neutral winds in the E region," Liu said.

The researchers want to understand this phenomena because it can disrupt HF (high frequency) and VHF (very high frequency) bands of radio communication, which have important uses in areas such as navigation.

With greater insight into activity in the E layer during a geomagnetic storm, the researchers hope to find ways to work around the disruptions.

The new paper was published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

A first-of its-kind space weather "tabletop" exercise has revealed major weaknesses in America's preparedness for severe solar storms.

In May 2024, participants representing local and national government agencies gathered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and at a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) site in Denver, Colorado, to learn how ready they were for a major solar storm. Results of the unique exercise they conducted have recently been released in a new report.

The exercise, which lasted two days, had the participants pretend that the sun expelled several giant coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which were hurtling toward Earth. CMEs are eruptions of strongly magnetized plasma from the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona. These giant clouds of charged particles take several days to reach Earth, but when they do, they can wreak havoc with the planet's magnetic field and the upper atmosphere.

The geomagnetic storms caused by these interactions can trigger power blackouts, disrupt satellite signals and damage satellite electronics. They can also subject astronauts in space to high doses of radiation. Although super-powerful geomagnetic storms only hit once every few decades, the disruption they can cause to our technology-dependent society is significant. Yet, the participants of the exercise, which was organized by the Space Weather Research and Operations Center (SWORM) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), found that a lack of communication protocols and insufficient measurements from space and on the ground hamper effective response to such incidents.

The scenario explored in the exercise asked the participants to time travel to January 2028. NASA's Artemis 4 mission is orbiting the moon with two astronauts aboard, and their two colleagues have just landed on the surface. At the same time, a giant sunspot has emerged on the solar surface and sent several flares and CMEs in Earth's direction.

Related: World's largest solar telescope turns on powerful new camera, revealing breathtaking image of a continent-size sunspot

The exercise made the participants aware of significant limitations of current space weather forecasting capabilities, according to the report, which was published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in mid-April.

As the hypothetical CMEs neared the planet, the participants realized that the lack of measurements prevented accurate modeling and forecast of impacts, which in turn therefore complicated effective decision making.

The biggest problem, the participants realized, was the fact that, although a CME takes up to three days to reach the planet, the scope of its impact is dependent on the orientation of the magnetic field in the plasma it carries.

When the cloud and Earth's magnetic field meet with the same poles, they mostly repel each other. When opposite poles collide, however, an enormous energy exchange follows that can wreak havoc on Earth and in orbit. The magnetic field orientation of the incoming cloud, however, is only known about 30 minutes before the CME hits, when the cloud passes the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1, a gravitationally stable spot about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth where several sun-observing spacecraft are located.

The report highlights the need to deploy more satellites to improve the forecasters' "ability to predict events, enhance real-time data collection, improve forecasting models and provide earlier warnings."

In the hypothetical scenario, the sequence of powerful eruptions led to widespread power blackouts, disruption of satellite and radio communication and degradation of GPS positioning, navigation and timing services. In a real-life situation, the primary impacts would lead to serious disruptions in many sectors, including aviation, emergency response and health care, as hospitals would have to rely on back-up power generators for days.

In space, satellites deviated from their trajectories due to the changes in air density caused by the sudden heating triggered by the energetic processes. As a result, satellite trackers on the ground were unable to ascertain satellite positions and determine collision risk. NASA experts, at the same time, were trying to determine the risk to the astronauts and decide on emergency measures.

As the hypothetical solar storm worsened, the exercise participants quickly became overwhelmed with information. The report recommended that government authorities develop communication and messaging templates like those used in other natural disaster situations such as hurricanes. The participants concluded that government agencies across the board need to cooperate to prepare for significant space weather events.

Coincidentally, the exercise took place at the same time as the Gannon Storm, the most powerful solar storm in 20 years, which meant many of the problems studied could be, on a smaller scale, verified in practice.

The Gannon Storm hit Earth on May 10, 2024, and triggered a mass migration of satellites that rendered Earth's orbit unsafe for days. It also caused local power outages and widespread radio and satellite communication blackouts. Still, the Gannon Storm was nowhere near as potent as the most energetic solar storm to take place in recorded history — the 1859 Carrington Event.

Since the current solar cycle — the 11-year ebb and flow in the number of sunspots and eruptions — has only just reached its peak, scientists worry that more solar drama is on tap in the coming years.

Originally posted on Space.com.

The sun has had an active few days, firing several powerful solar flares and (plumes of searing-hot solar material out into space.

On Tuesday (May 13), a sunspot on the sun's surface named AR4086 exploded, releasing an X1.2-class solar flare, part of the most powerful category of flare. Then, during the early hours of Wednesday (May 14), another sunspot named AR4087 spat out an M5.3 flare, followed by an even more powerful X2.7 flare, and yet another M7.7 flare a few hours later.

The radiation of these solar flares triggered radio blackouts on the sun-facing side of the planet at the time of the flares, affecting North and South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

Solar flares are sudden, intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation released from regions of intense magnetic activity on the sun's surface, usually from or near sunspots. The sun's surface is threaded with powerful magnetic fields, and sometimes these magnetic field lines get twisted and tangled. When the stress on these field lines becomes too great, they can snap and realign, releasing a massive amount of stored magnetic energy as a solar flare.

Some solar flares are much more powerful than others. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center categorizes solar flares as either A, B, C, M, or X-class, with each class representing a ten-fold increase in power over the previous one. X-class flares are the most powerful and least common form of solar flare. The number after the letter class indicates further how strong the flare is: an M9 flare is nine times more powerful than an M1 flare. This week's X1.2 and X2.7 flares were on the lower end of this most intense category; the strongest recorded flare in the last seven years was an X9 in October 2024.

These newly-launched X-class flares were the first of their kind recorded since March, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Related: A mysterious, 100-year solar cycle may have just restarted

Solar flares cause radio blackouts because of the intense X-ray and ultraviolet radiation unleashed on our planet's atmosphere. Normally, shortwave radio signals — used for long-distance communication — bounce off the ionosphere, allowing them to travel far across the globe. The radiation of a solar flare increases the ionization (charging) of atoms and molecules in the lower ionosphere, especially in a region called the D-layer, meaning that the D-layer absorbs radio signals instead of reflecting them, especially those in the high-frequency range.

X-class solar flares can cause radio blackouts across the sunlit side of the Earth, impacting mariners, aviators, and also triggering satellite navigation errors.

Wednesday's X2.7 flare also flung out a coronal mass ejection (CME), a massive explosion of charged solar plasma, which are often thrown from the sun's surface at the same time as a solar flare. While flares travel at the speed of light, taking only 8 minutes to reach Earth, CMEs usually travel at between 250 kilometers per second (km/s) and 3000 km/s, taking up to a few days to reach our planet.

When a CME arrives at Earth, the charged particles interact with our planet's atmosphere and magnetic field, usually triggering a geomagnetic storm that results in the appearance of the northern and southern lights, as well as potential power grid failures and impacts to satellites and GPS. Geomagnetic storms are classed from G1 to G5, with the most powerful G5 storms resulting in auroras "as low as Florida and southern Texas" and the "complete collapse or blackouts" of some power grids, according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.

However, due to the position of sunspot AR4087 at the sun's northeastern limb, this CME and others potentially released by recent solar flares have not been directed toward Earth, instead aiming for our planetary neighbour Mars. NASA models show that the CME is due to hit the Red Planet on Sunday (May 18), and could trigger auroras across Mars' atmosphere.

Over the next few days, sunspot AR4087 will slowly inch across the sun, putting Earth directly in its line of fire. If the sunspot fires off more solar flares, we could be due for more radio blackouts, and if these flares are accompanied by CMEs, we might experience geomagnetic storms, resulting in auroras being visible much further away from the poles than usual.

According to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, there is a high chance of at least M-class solar flares heading our way in the coming three days.

"Given the magnetic complexity of Region 4087, there's a 65% chance that M-Class level flare activity will occur through 17 May with a 30% chance for X-Class levels during the same time," the Space Weather Prediction Center said in a forecast discussion on Thursday.

Sun quiz: How well do you know our home star?

Scientists caught a massive and extremely powerful X-class solar flare being spat out from the sun on Friday (March 28), just before the stellar eruption triggered a radio blackout across two continents.

A video captured by the GOES-16 satellite, which is jointly operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), shows the X-class solar flare bursting forth from a sunspot on the sun's surface at around 11:20 a.m. EST on March 28.

This X1.1-class solar flare, which was released from a sunspot named AR4046, marks the first X-class flare the sun has released since early February.

"A strong solar flare (R3) occurred and peaked at X1.1 near 11:20am EDT (1520 UTC) on 28 March, 2025. The flare occurred from the vicinity of newly rotated into view Region 4046 near the east limb," NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said in a statement after the flare.

Related: Our sun may be overdue for a 'superflare' stronger than billions of atomic bombs, new research warns

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center shared the spectacular video on X, formerly known as Twitter, showing the solar flare erupting from the sun alongside a cloud of solar material known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). CMEs are massive bursts of plasma and magnetic field from the sun that are ejected into space, usually during solar flares. These fast-moving blobs of plasma can cause serious disturbances to satellites and power grids if Earth happens to be in their path.

Dangerous flare-ups

Solar flares are intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation that erupt from the sun’s surface, usually from magnetically active regions like sunspots. When the sun's magnetic fields tangle, break, and reconnect, massive amounts of energy are released in the form of light, heat, and charged particles. Solar flares are classified on a scale of A, B, C, M, and X. Each class is 10 times more powerful than the last, with X-class flares being the most powerful and least frequent.

Related: X-class solar flares hit a new record in 2024 and could spike further this year — but the sun isn't entirely to blame, experts say

When the radiation from a solar flare is aimed toward Earth, it can cause radio blackouts across the side of the planet facing the sun. This occurs because the solar flare's intense X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation ionize Earth's upper atmosphere, specifically the ionosphere, which is situated between 30 miles (48 km) and 600 miles (965 km) above Earth's surface.

The ionosphere consists of several layers that reflect and refract radio waves, allowing high-frequency radio signals to travel long distances around the world. When solar flares ionize the D-layer, which is the lowest part of the ionosphere, this causes radio waves to be absorbed instead of being reflected, and leads to signal degradation or complete loss of high-frequency radio communications in the affected area.

This March 28 solar flare caused a radio blackout across North and South America and the Atlantic on Friday morning.

"Immediate, wider area of strong degradation or signal loss in high frequency (HF) communication bands over much of the sunlit side of Earth; users of HF radio signals may experience loss of contact or major disruptions for a number of minutes to a couple of hours in the affected areas," NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said in the statement.

When this solar flare was released, a CME followed shortly after.

CMEs usually arrive at the Earth several days after a solar flare, and can trigger geomagnetic storms if they collide with the Earth's magnetic field, resulting in the appearance of the aurora. CMEs can also knock satellites out of the sky, tamper with GPS-based equipment on Earth, and trigger widespread power outages in really severe cases.

Luckily, the newly-launched CME is not expected to hit our planet, so no geomagnetic storms are expected in the coming days.

"The CME is likely … not Earth-directed; however analyses continues to be sure of no flanking influences," NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said in the caption of the X post.

The sunspot that caused the flare and the CME (AR4046) is moving around the sun to face our planet, meaning that if it releases any more flares or CMEs, they will likely hit the Earth head-on.

"The flare source region will rotate to face Earth in the coming week. Further strong solar activity is likely!" solar astrophysicist Ryan French wrote in a post on X.

Additionally, a new sunspot named AR4048 is also turning toward Earth, and is expected to churn out some powerful flares and CMEs in the coming days. According to a Space Weather Prediction Center Forecast Discussion, there is an overall 15% chance of another X-class flare occurring between March 31 and April 2, "primarily due to AR 4048".

UPDATE: The Northern Lights could be visible in the U.S. tonight (March 26), appearing as far south as New York and Idaho due to a "coronal hole" sending streams of charged particles toward Earth.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) initally issued a G2 geomagnetic storm warning for Tuesday, March 25, which has now been extended into Wednesday (March 26).

Like hurricanes, geomagnetic storms follow a 5-point severity scale. G2 storms are considered "moderate" in strength and could cause minor technological disruptions such as radio blackouts, GPS malfunctions, and an increased chance of spotting auroras at lower latitudes than usual.

"Watches of this level are not uncommon," according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center; G2-strength geomagnetic storms hit Earth about 360 days in each 11-year solar cycle. These storms can affect spacecraft orbits and cause weak power grid fluctuations at high latitudes, but they mostly cause "manageable effects to some technological infrastructure," according to NOAA.

The Space Weather Prediction Center issued the extended storm warning because a "coronal hole" on the sun is facing Earth. Coronal holes are cooler, darker regions of the sun's outermost atmosphere (the corona) that are less dense than normal, allowing high-speed solar winds — streams of charged particles — to escape from the sun and gush outward into space. Currently, one of these escaped high-speed streams is pointed directly at Earth.

Related: Powerful 'equinox auroras' may arrive soon: Why changing seasons can bring the best northern lights

Earth's magnetic field deflects most of the solar wind, but some charged particles make it through into the upper layers of the atmosphere. When the solar wind hits Earth's atmosphere, charged particles shoot toward Earth's poles, agitating atmospheric molecules along the way and forcing them to emit energy in the form of colorful auroras.

In October 2024, the sun reached its solar maximum period, the most active part of its 11-year cycle. During this period, the sun's magnetic poles flip, and space weather events like geomagnetic storms and solar flares occur more frequently. Scientists predict that the solar maximum will continue for at least a few more months if not longer, providing additional opportunities to spot the Northern Lights.

On Wednesday night, "the aurora may become visible over some northern and upper Midwest states from New York to Idaho," according to a statement from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.

The best chances of spotting an aurora are on dark, clear nights between 10pm and 2am, far from artificial lights. You can see auroras with the naked eye, but their colors might look even more vivid through a smartphone screen.

Editor's note: This article was updated March 26 after NOAA extended its geomagnetic storm warning.

A new robot is set to capture the first global images of Earth's magnetic field "breathing" in and out from the surface of the moon, NASA has announced.

The Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) — an instrument that can detect X-rays bouncing off Earth's magnetosphere — is part of the payload set to launch into space aboard Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Lander on Jan. 15.

Upon landing on the moon's surface, the instrument will power on before directing its gaze back to Earth for six days, collecting images of our planet's magnetic field by detecting low-energy X-rays reflecting from its surface.

"We expect to see the magnetosphere breathing out and breathing in, for the first time," Hyunju Connor, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and the NASA lead for LEXI, said in a statement. "When the solar wind is very strong, the magnetosphere will shrink and push backward toward Earth, and then expand when the solar wind weakens."

Related: Ancient solar storm smashed Earth at the wrong part of the sun's cycle — and scientists are concerned

An ever-changing shield

Earth's magnetosphere is formed by the churning of metal inside our planet's molten core, and shields us from harmful cosmic rays as well as the electrically-charged solar wind that launches constantly from the sun. When radiation hits Earth's magnetosphere, it either gets reflected or trapped along magnetic field lines before raining down on the poles in a process known as magnetic reconnection.

The resulting geomagnetic storms can cause spectacular auroras to appear in our planet's skies, but they can also fry electronics, wipe data servers and send satellites tumbling from space.

This makes lingering questions about how space particles rain down on Earth (including whether they do so simultaneously or in bursts) all the more important to answer.

"We want to understand how nature behaves," Connor said, "and by understanding this we can help protect our infrastructure in space."

While this month's voyage is the first time LEXI, or any detector, will capture a full picture of Earth's magnetosphere, it isn't the instrument's first trip into space. In 2012, LEXI, then named STORM (Sheath Transport Observer for the Redistribution of Mass), launched into space aboard a sounding rocket to collect X-ray images before falling back to Earth.

Following the refurbishment of some key components and optics, the instrument is now set to fly again.

"We're trying to get this big picture of Earth's space environment," Brian Walsh, a space physicist at Boston University and LEXI's principal investigator, said in the statement. "A lot of physics can be esoteric or difficult to follow without years of specific training, but this will be science that you can see."

Our sun could produce catastrophic superflares far more often than previously thought — and one may even be due soon — according to new research.

Superflares are solar megastorms thousands of times more powerful than regular solar flares, capable of wreaking incalculable damage as they fry electronics, wipe data servers and send satellites tumbling from space.

Past studies, made by observing stars similar to our own, suggested that superflares likely happened once every few thousand years. But now, a new study of 56,000 sun-like stars has revealed that stars like ours may experience powerful superflares much more often than we thought — roughly once every century. However, some crucial questions remain. The researchers published their findings Dec. 13 in the journal Science.

"Our results demonstrate that stars with Sun-like [stars] ... can indeed produce superflares," Valeriy Vasilyev, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, told Live Science in an email. "Ionizing radiation, UV, and X-rays during a superflare (as well as from a [coronal mass ejection, a plasma wave launched from the sun] if it accompanies the superflare) can have significant impacts. Details such as the impact on Earth's atmosphere, magnetosphere, and technological systems are important subjects for further investigation."

The sun is a gigantic ball of plasma whose charged ions swirl over its surface to create powerful magnetic fields. As magnetic-field lines cannot cross each other, sometimes these fields knot before suddenly snapping to launch bursts of radiation called solar flares, which are sometimes accompanied by enormous coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

If these outbursts are facing Earth, the X-rays and ultraviolet radiation produced by the flares knock electrons from atoms in the upper atmosphere, forming an ionized screen that high-frequency radio waves cannot bounce off that leads to radio blackouts. These blackouts occur over the areas lit by the sun during the time of the flare and last one or two hours.

Related: Ancient solar storm smashed Earth at the wrong part of the sun's cycle — and scientists are concerned

One of the largest solar storms in recent history was the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles set telegraph systems around the world on fire and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.

Yet some evidence, such as sudden spikes in radiocarbon levels found inside ancient tree rings, suggests that our sun could be capable of producing flares hundreds of times stronger than the Carrington Event. If pointed toward Earth, these storms could prove to be disastrous.

To investigate the likelihood of a superflare being produced by our sun, the researchers behind the new study used NASA's Kepler space telescope to study 56,450 stars, identifying 2,889 superflares coming from 2,527 stars like our sun between 2009 and 2013.

Compared to previous studies, this is a significant step up in the frequency of devastating superflares, a result the researchers attribute to biases in past experiments, such as only measuring stars with rotation periods similar to our sun.

As most rotation periods (which are tied to solar activity) are difficult to detect, this led a lot of stars like ours to be excluded from prior observations. But the astronomers behind the study developed a new method to work around these biases.

"We employed a new flare detection method developed by our group to identify flare sources in light curves and images with sub-pixel resolution, accounting for instrumental effects," Vasilyev said. "This method has been applied for the first time to detect superflares, enabling the analysis of a much larger sample of stars."

However, despite their troubling findings, some assumptions within the study remain unexplored. These include possible unobserved differences between our own sun and the sun-like stars they observed flaring. For example, 30% of these flaring stars exist in binary pairs — two stars orbiting a shared center of gravity — which could be triggering superflares through tidal interactions.

Loose ends such as these will need to be investigated further before we can be sure that the sun is likely to pummel Earth with a superflare soon, the researchers say.

In the meantime, they recommend better forecasting of the sun to predict when it might throw its next extreme tantrum — an endeavor which will be helped by the planned launch of the European Space Agency’s Vigil probe in 2031.

"I hope people will carefully investigate [this question] after reading our paper," Vasilyev said.

The sun has unleashed an enormous X-class solar flare, temporarily triggering a radio blackout above parts of the U.S. and unleashing a hefty coronal mass ejection (CME) that will likely slam into our planet, potentially triggering vibrant aurora displays later this week.

The X-class solar flare — the most powerful type the sun can produce — exploded outward from sunspot AR3842 near the solar equator at around 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday (Oct. 1). The flare had a magnitude of X7.1, making it the second most powerful solar explosion of the current solar cycle, Solar Cycle 25, which began in 2019. The most powerful flare was a monster X8.7 magnitude blast in May, which was the most powerful flare in the last seven years.

Radiation from Tuesday's supercharged flare bypassed Earth's magnetic shield, or magnetosphere, and ionized the upper parts of the upper atmosphere, creating a temporary radio blackout above large parts of the Pacific Ocean, including Hawaii. The explosion also hurled a CME — a cloud of fast-moving plasma and radiation — into space, which NASA predicts will collide with Earth on Saturday (Oct. 5), according to Spaceweather.com.

When the CME hits our planet, it will likely trigger a disturbance in the magnetosphere, known as a geomagnetic storm, that enables solar particles to penetrate deep into the atmosphere and trigger vibrant aurora displays at unusually low latitudes. A similar geomagnetic storm occurred in mid-August after another X-class flare hurled a CME right at us.

Related: Could a powerful solar storm wipe out the internet?

The latest solar outburst is another sign that we have likely entered solar maximum — the peak of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle, which occurs right before its magnetic field completely flips.

Scientists had initially predicted that the solar maximum would begin next year and be less active than the peaks of past solar cycles. However, it quickly became obvious that the sun's explosive peak would arrive sooner and be more active than expected, forcing researchers to update their forecasts for the first time in their history.

2024 has already been rife with solar activity. In May, our planet experienced its most powerful geomagnetic storm for 21 years after a barrage of CMEs, which triggered potentially the most widespread auroras for 500 years. And in August, the number of visible sunspots hit a 23-year high.

So far this year, the sun has unleashed a total of 41 X-class solar flares, which is more than the last nine years combined, according to SpaceWeatherLive.com.

Over the next few months, the number of geomagnetic storms and auroras could also spike further as Earth's magnetic field becomes more closely aligned with the solar wind around the fall equinox.

Throughout the rest of the solar maximum, which could last for at least another year, there is an increased chance of the sun unleashing even more immense solar storms on par with the Carrington Event of 1859 — the most powerful solar storm on record. If such a storm were to hit us today, it could disrupt ground-based infrastructure, such as the power grid, and knock out most of our satellites, potentially causing trillions of dollars worth of damages.

The active sun is kicking into overdrive and we could be in for yet more dazzling auroras.

In the early morning hours of Aug. 14, the sun unleashed the most powerful class of solar flare, in a potent X-class eruption. The solar flare peaked at 2:40 a.m. EDT (0640 GMT) and caused shortwave radio blackouts over the sunlit portion of Earth at the time of the eruption, Asia and the Indian Ocean.

What makes this X-class solar flare particularly interesting is that it erupted from 'rule-breaking' sunspot AR3784 which had already garnered the attention of solar scientists and aurora chasers due to its strange polarity.

The sunspot's polarity breaks a hundred-year-old rule, Hale's Law, whereby sunspots in the Northern Hemisphere should be polarized -+. Instead, sunspot AR3784 is polarized ±, a whole 90-degree twist, according to Spaceweather.com.

RELATED: Sun fires off double-barreled X-class flares in span of 2 hours

It's not the first sunspot to break the rule, according to spaceweather.com, it happens approximately 3% of the time. However, a majority of "rule-breakers" show a "reversed polarity" of +- instead of -+, but AR3784 lies somewhere between the two.

Experts at Spaceweather.com suggested that the "magnetic underpinnings of this sunspot are corkscrewing in an unusual way. If opposite magnetic polarities get twisted together too tightly, there could be an X-class solar flare." Lo and behold the sunspot did just that.

Solar flares are eruptions on the sun's surface that release intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. These flares occur when built-up magnetic energy in the solar atmosphere is suddenly released. They are classified by size into different categories, with X-class flares being the most powerful. M-class flares are 10 times less intense than X-class, followed by C-class flares, which are 10 times weaker than M-class. B-class flares are 10 times weaker than C-class, and A-class flares, which are 10 times weaker than B-class, have no significant effects on Earth. Within each class, numbers from 1 to 10 (and beyond for X-class) indicate the relative strength of the flare.

Powerful solar flares like the one released on Aug. 14 can often be accompanied by a coronal mass ejection — a large plume of plasma and magnetic field from the sun. It has since been confirmed that yesterday's X-flare hurled off a faint CME directly toward Earth.

The exact timing of when the CME will arrive is uncertain with NOAA's model suggesting an arrival date of Aug. 18 while NASA's model leans closer to Aug. 17.

Aurora hunters cross your fingers and charge those cameras! (If you hope to snap a photo of the northern lights, check out our guide on where and how to photograph auroras.)

CMEs carry electrically charged particles known as ions, and when these collide with Earth's magnetosphere, they can trigger geomagnetic storms. During these storms, the ions interact with gases in Earth's atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light. This phenomenon is recognized as the northern lights, or aurora borealis, in the Northern Hemisphere, and as the southern lights, or aurora australis, in the Southern Hemisphere.

It wasn't just a CME that accompanied the X-flare but also a strong radio blackout. The shortwave radio blackouts detected over Asia and the Indian Ocean resulted from the intense burst of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation emitted during the X-flare.

Radiation from solar flares reaches Earth at the speed of light and ionizes the upper atmosphere upon arrival. This ionization creates a denser environment for high-frequency shortwave radio signals that facilitate long-distance communication to travel through.

As these radio waves pass through ionized (electrically charged) layers, they lose energy due to increased collisions with electrons, which can weaken or entirely absorb the radio signals.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Three high-speed solar explosions known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are set to slam into Earth's magnetic field this weekend, bringing stunning auroras as far south as New York and Idaho. 

Striking Earth in succession on Aug. 9, 10 and 11, the CMEs will coincide with the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center alert. 

If a geomagnetic storm is triggered, the sun eruptions will create a curtain of shifting light through which the bright tails of the Perseid shooting stars can be seen.

NOAA predicts possible auroras this weekend in the northern parts of most states along the U.S.-Canada border, including Washington, Idaho, Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Maine. Here is the agency's latest aurora forecast.

The third and final CME, which burst from the sun's surface on Aug 8., "is moving faster than 1,000 km/s (2.2 million mph) and it will likely arrive no later than Aug. 11th, adding its effect to that of two earlier CMEs [which erupted on Aug. 7] already en route," according to an update from spaceweather.com.

CMEs originate from sunspots, regions on the sun's surface where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electrical charges, coil into knots before abruptly snapping. 

The massive  energy release can eject gigantic plumes of solar material from the sun's surface out into the solar system. Once launched, CMEs travel millions of miles per hour, sweeping up charged particles from the solar wind to form a giant, combined wavefront.

Related: Sun fires off double-barreled X-class flares in span of 2 hours

These high-speed barrages of solar debris are safely absorbed by Earth's magnetic field, but they can still cause impressive geomagnetic storms. During these storms, the field lines that loop between our planet's south and north magnetic poles get compressed slightly by waves of highly energetic particles. 

These particles trickle down magnetic-field lines close to the poles and agitate molecules in the atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light to create colorful auroras known as the northern lights.

NOAA classifies geomagnetic storms from G5 to G1, going from strongest to weakest. This weekend's storm is expected to be a mild G2 class, but if the effects of the CMEs combine "the impact could push geomagnetic storm levels to category G3 (Strong) with mid-latitude auroras in the USA and Europe," spaceweather wrote.

More intense geomagnetic storms can disrupt our planet's magnetic field enough to send satellites tumbling to Earth, and scientists have warned that extreme geomagnetic storms could even cripple the internet.

The largest solar storm in recent history was the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly as much energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles fried telegraph systems around the world and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.

Scientists warn that if a similar event were to happen today, it would cause trillions of dollars' worth of damage, trigger widespread blackouts and endanger thousands of lives. A solar storm in 1989 released a billion-ton gas plume that caused a blackout across Quebec, according to NASA.

Solar storms typically undergo an uptick during the maximum phase of the sun's 11-year cycle. Some experts think this solar climax will arrive in 2025, but the sun's defiance of recent forecasts has led others to believe the maximum may already be here.

Scientists anticipate that the sun's activity will steadily climb for the next few years, reaching an overall maximum in 2025 before decreasing again.

The sun showcased its immense power yet again this morning (August 5), firing off not one but two X-class flares.

X flares are the strongest solar flare class. Today's first X blast, which launched from a sunspot called AR3767, reached its peak around 9:40 a.m. EDT (1340 GMT), clocking in at X1.7 on solar scientists' flare scale. Then, less than two hours later, the sunspot AR3780 fired off an X1.1 class solar flare, which peaked at 11:27 a.m. EDT (1527 GMT).

Solar flares are often accompanied by huge eruptions of solar plasma called coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which can cause geomagnetic storms if they hit Earth. These storms can have negative consequences, such as the disruption of power grids, but they can also supercharge the auroras, making these light shows more intense and extending them to lower latitudes than usual.

RELATED: Rare, mystery blasts from sun can devastate the ozone layer and spike radiation levels on Earth

That's exactly what happened this past weekend, as a G3 (strong) geomagnetic storm brought the northern lights into view across parts of the U.S. West Coast.

Based on the location of AR3767, however, direct impacts from a CME (if one did indeed launch along with today's first X flare) are unlikely, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) shared on X today. Today's second flare is currently being investigated for any impacts as of this afternoon.

Through the middle of the week (Aug. 7), SWPC scientists forecast that the flare activity will persist from three active sunspots — AR3772, AR374 and AR3780 — as they parade across the sun from left to right, remaining visible in our view of the solar disk.

Low-end geomagnetic storms also remain possible, but that could change, depending on how strong future solar storms are, and if any send CMEs in Earth's direction.

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Originally posted on Space.com.

If you want to glimpse the northern lights from below the Arctic Circle, be ready to drive to dark skies the first week of June. 

Earth's most powerful geomagnetic storm in more than two decades happened between May 10 and May 12, painting the skies with colorful auroras as far south as Florida and Mexico in an ultra-rare occurrence. 

This was the result of at least five solar storms that hit Earth simultaneously, all originating from a massive sunspot known as active region 3664 (also called AR3664 and AR13664), a dark patch on the sun more than 15 times wider than Earth. The barrage of charged particles collided with Earth's magnetosphere, which funneled them along magnetic field lines toward the poles, generating vibrant auroras along the way.

Crucially, the fallout from the solar storms arrived a few nights after May's new moon, when the night sky was free from moonlight — making even faint auroras easier to see. 

Because the sun rotates on its axis once every 27 days, the sunspot disappeared from view around a week later, but it didn't stop producing solar flares. On May 20, it emitted a solar flare rated as X12, the strongest since September 2017. It was observed by the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft. 

AR3664/AR13664 is now becoming visible again as the sun rotates — and it will be Earth-facing once again during the new moon on June 6. 

"It will align nicely," Ryan French, a solar physicist at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Boulder, Colorado, told Live Science. "As soon as the sunspot starts to appear, we will enter the window of opportunity [for solar flares]." 

Related: 32 stunning photos of auroras seen from space

The monster sunspot will reappear in late May/early June, but when the sunspot reaches just to the right of the center of the sun, from our perspective, the sun-Earth system will be most connected. That's when our planet is most likely to be hit by solar weather, potentially resulting in another display of auroras at low latitudes.

"That's exactly where it produced all of those large flares," said French. "But in theory, if you had a large enough eruption, even if it's just to the left of the sun's center, we could still get the edge of that impact."

June 6's new moon rises exactly 27 days after May 10, so be on alert a few nights before and after that date — just in case there's a repeat of last month's extreme geomagnetic activity. If auroras are visible near you, you'll need to get far from obscuring clouds and city lights to be able to see them.

Even after June's new moon, there may still be other chances to catch the aurora near you this year. Sunspots appear in greater frequency — and trigger more powerful solar flares — during the peak of the sun's 11-year activity cycle, known as the solar maximum. Scientists suspect that the current cycle's maximum may already be underway, hitting us sooner and harder than previously estimated. But we won't be able to determine the maximum's precise timing until after it ends, and solar activity finally quiets down again.

Update: This article was updated on May 29 to specify where to look for the sunspot after it reappears. It will be just to the right of the sun's center.

Scientists have found the possible origins of the sun's magnetic field, and it's not where they thought it was.

The discovery, made using complex computer simulations, suggests that the sun's magnetic field arises from instabilities in the plasma across the outermost layers of the solar surface, rather than from deep within the star as researchers previously thought.

If the findings are right, their discovery could give scientists a better chance of predicting solar flares and storms that can cause power outages, cripple the internet and even send satellites tumbling to Earth. The researchers revealed their findings in a study published May 22 in the journal Nature.

"I think this result may be controversial," co-author Keaton Burns, a research scientist at MIT, said in a statement. "Most of the community has been focused on finding dynamo action deep in the sun. Now we're showing there's a different mechanism that seems to be a better match to observations."

The sun is a gigantic ball of plasma whose charged ions swirl to create powerful magnetic fields. This region of roiling, flowing plasma, known as the "convection zone," comprises the top third of the sun's radius — stretching from the surface to roughly 124,000 miles (200,000 kilometers) beneath its surface. 

Related: Solar maximum may already be upon us, expert warns — but we won't know for sure until the sun's explosive peak is over

Magnetic field lines cannot cross each other, so sometimes these fields knot into kinks before suddenly snapping — which in turn launches bursts of radiation called solar flares or enormous plumes of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) out into space. Once launched, CMEs travel at millions of miles per hour, sweeping up charged particles from the solar wind to form a giant, combined wavefront that, if pointed toward Earth, can trigger geomagnetic storms over our planet.

But researchers weren't sure exactly where most of the sun's magnetism originates from. Previously, scientists have tried to work it out using 3D computer simulations to map the flow of plasma, but these models tended to be too simple.

"Those simulations require millions of hours on national supercomputing facilities, but what they produce is still nowhere near as turbulent as the actual sun," Burns said. 

For the new study, the researchers instead turned to data taken from a field known as helioseismology, which uses observations of vibrations rippling across the sun's outer surface to infer the structure inside.

The researchers created their model using algorithms of these surface vibrations, and the results suggested that changes in the flow of plasma across the top 5% to 10% of the sun's surface most closely matched the magnetic fields seen from the outside. When they added possible effects produced by the sun's deeper layers to the simulation, the picture became muddier — no longer pairing with the sun's observed magnetic field.

"The features we see when looking at the sun, like the corona that many people saw during the recent solar eclipse, sunspots, and solar flares, are all associated with the sun's magnetic field," Burns said. "We show that isolated perturbations near the sun's surface, far from the deeper layers, can grow over time to potentially produce the magnetic structures we see."

By further developing their model, the researchers hope to better understand and eventually predict solar storms. Solar activity rises and falls in a roughly 11-year cycle, with intense solar flares and CMEs far more likely to occur during the peak period, known as solar maximum Scientists think we may already be entering the solar maximum of the current cycle, and that this period could be more intense than initially predicted 

The increased activity has sent waves of high-energy plasma and X-ray bursts slamming into Earth's magnetic fields, downing Starlink satellites, triggering radio blackouts and causing auroras as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon. 

AR3664 is no ordinary sunspot. 

The behemoth dark patch on the sun's surface has ballooned in recent days, becoming one of the largest and most active sunspots seen this solar cycle. 

AR3664 garnered the attention of scientists earlier this week as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center issued a warning of increased solar flare risk from the solar giant on Tuesday (May 7).

"Region 3664 has grown considerably and has become much more magnetically complex," NOAA's SWPC reports. "This has led to increased solar flare probabilities over the next several days." 

The giant sunspot has more than lived up to expectations. Firing out countless powerful solar flares in recent days, including a colossal X-class solar flare this morning (May 9), peaking at 5:13 a.m. EDT (0913 GMT).

Related: What if the Carrington Event, the largest solar storm ever recorded, happened today?

Solar flares are eruptions from the sun's surface that emit intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. They are categorized by size into lettered groups, with X-class being the most powerful. Then there are M-class flares that are 10 times less powerful than X-class flares, followed by C-class flares which are 10 times weaker than M-class flares, B-class are 10 times weaker than C-class flares and finally, A-class flares, which are 10 times weaker than B-class flares and have no noticeable consequences on Earth. Within each class, numbers from 1-10 (and beyond for X-class flares) describe a flare's relative strength. 

The X-flare this morning clocked in at X 2.25 according to spaceweatherlive.com, measured by NASA's GOES-16 satellite. 

Radio blackouts

Powerful solar flares like the one observed this morning can cause shortwave radio blackouts on the sunlit side of Earth at the time of the eruption. As such, the X-flare this morning caused shortwave radio blackouts across Europe and Africa as seen in the image above. 

The radio blackouts are due to the strong pulse of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation emitted during the eruption.

The radiation travels toward Earth at the speed of light and ionizes (gives electrical charge to) the top of Earth's atmosphere. (Note: these ionizing X-rays are not to be confused with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) by which plasma and magnetic fields erupt from the sun, traveling at slower speeds, often taking several days to reach Earth).

This ionization causes a higher-density environment for the high-frequency shortwave radio signals to navigate through in order to support communication over long distances. The radio waves that interact with electrons in the ionized layers lose energy due to more frequent collisions, and this can lead to radio signals becoming degraded or completely absorbed according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.  

Sunspot visible from Earth 

Sprawling out at almost 124,000 (200,000 kilometers) from end to end, the sunspot AR3664 is currently 15 times wider than our home planet, according to Spaceweather.com. 

It is so big that it can be seen from Earth without the need for magnification. If you still have a pair of solar eclipse glasses lying around after April 8's total solar eclipse, you can use them to safely observe the sun and see the mammoth sunspot cross the solar disk. 

But remember NEVER look at the sun without appropriate solar protection. You can find out how to safely observe the sun with this helpful solar observation guide. 

Rivaling Carrington's sunspot

The vast size of Sunspot AR3664 rivals Carrington's sunspot of 1859, as depicted in this image from Spaceweather.com. Carrington's sunspot is known for its explosive rampage between August and September 1859, during which it fired off a series of powerful solar flares and CMEs, resulting in major geomagnetic storms that ignited telegraph offices and triggered auroras as close to the equator as Cuba and Hawaii. 

Although studies suggest Carrington-class solar storms occur every 40 to 60 years or so (and we are long overdue), there is no evidence that any CMEs currently en route from previous solar eruptions this week could cause a new Carrington Event, according to Spaceweather.com. 

Scientists are keeping a close eye on this ever-growing sunspot while it continues to face Earth. 

Satellites have detected a massive solar flare powerful enough to ionize part of Earth's atmosphere.

Scientists spotted the flare erupting from the bottom of the sun on Thursday (March 28), using satellites from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to the organization's Space Weather Prediction Center. 

The flare, which peaked at 4:56 p.m. ET, was categorized as an X1.1 flare. X-class flares are the most powerful type of explosion the sun can produce, according to NASA. 

The explosion was so powerful that it ionized the top of Earth's atmosphere, resulting in a "deep shortwave radio blackout over the Pacific Ocean," SpaceWeather.com reported.

The solar outburst was also accompanied by an enormous belch of plasma known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). NOAA scientists were initially concerned that the CME would collide with Earth, potentially resulting in a geomagnetic storm that could impact satellites, radio communications and other infrastructure. However, on Friday (March 29) the agency announced that the outburst would likely miss Earth.

Related: Giant sunspot grew 10 times wider than Earth in just 48 hours, then spat X-class flare right at us

Solar flares are large explosions that occur at the sun's surface when twisted magnetic-field lines suddenly snap, emitting large bursts of electromagnetic radiation, according to Space.com, Live Science's sister site.

This solar event comes on the heels of a "double" X-class flare that occurred Monday (March 25), triggering the most powerful geomagnetic storm on our planet in six years. Not only that, but the unique event was made up of two simultaneous explosions, also known as a sympathetic solar flare. 

The abundance of back-to-back solar events has led scientists to think the sun may have entered its explosive era of peak activity, known as solar maximum — which seems to be starting a year earlier than previous forecasts predicted. However, researchers will have to wait until the sun "calms down" to know for sure.

What we do know is that X-class flares are most common during solar maximum, which is part of the sun's 11-year solar cycle. So far in 2024, seven X-class flares, including the latest one, have burst from the sun, which is already half the number that reached Earth in 2023, Live Science previously reported. 

The sun has just bombarded Earth with the most powerful geomagnetic storm our planet has seen in more than six years. The massive storm occurred after an eruption from an extremely rare "double" X-class flare disturbed Earth's magnetic field, lighting up the skies across the globe with vibrant auroras and other luminous phenomena.

The explosive event is another clear sign that the sun has likely reached the fiery peak of its roughly 11-year cycle of activity, known as solar maximum, meaning Earth could be in the firing line of more of these potentially harmful solar storms in the coming months.

On Saturday (March 23), the sun unleashed a 1.1 magnitude X-class solar flare — the most powerful type of explosion the sun can produce. This blast was unusual because it was made up of two simultaneous explosions, known as a sympathetic solar flare, ejected by a pair of sunspots (AR3614 and AR3615) separated by hundreds of thousands of miles, Spaceweather.com reported. 

The tandem explosion launched a massive cloud of plasma and radiation into space, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), that barreled into Earth's magnetosphere on Sunday (March 24). The collison sent shockwaves through the planet's invisible protective shield, temporarily weakening it. This allowed solar radiation to penetrate deeper into the atmosphere than normal and triggered auroras in Australia and New Zealand, as well as the aurora-like phenomenon STEVE (a.k.a. strong thermal emission velocity enhancement) in Alaska, according to Spaceweather.com.

Related: 10 solar storms that blew us away in 2023

At its peak, the geomagnetic storm reached severe (G4) status, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center, which is co-run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service. The last time Earth experienced a geomagnetic disturbance this powerful was September 2017, according to Spaceweather.com. (Geomagnetic storms range from minor (G1) to extreme (G5) intensity.)

The unusual nature of this solar explosion and intensity of the resulting geomagnetic storm are both clear indicators that the sun is nearing solar maximum. 

Some experts believe that the sun may have already entered this explosive phase, around a year earlier than initial forecasts predicted. But scientists won't know exactly when this period started until months after the sun eventually begins to calm down.

X-class flares become much more common during solar maximum. So far, six X-class flares have exploded from the sun in 2024, half as many as many that hit the planet in all of 2023, according to SpaceWeatherLive.com.

The increased frequency of these gargantuan explosions make strong geomagnetic storms more likely. In addition to colorful auroras, these storms can also impact ground-based infrastructure, cause satellites to tumble back to Earth and superheat the upper atmosphere. 

The solar maximum coincides with the upcoming total solar eclipse on April 8, giving millions of skywatchers in North America the rare opportunity to view the sun’s fiery outer atmosphere, or corona, when the moon totally covers the sun’s disk for up to four and a half minutes.  Given the amount of recent activity, the corona will likely be especially beautiful during totality. There is also a decent chance that onlookers may be able to see solar flares or CMEs during the event.

A gigantic, fiery eruption around 40 times wider than Earth recently exploded from the sun's hidden far side. The eruption hurled a massive cloud of plasma into space that later smashed into Mercury, scouring the planet's rocky surface and potentially triggering "X-ray auroras" on the unprotected world.

The eruption was likely triggered by a powerful solar flare, which occurred around 7 p.m. ET on March 9, Spaceweather.com reported. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spotted a large, partially obscured plasma filament exploding outward from behind the sun's northeast limb. Based on the amount of visible plasma, the eruption likely spanned around 310,000 miles (500,000 kilometers) across.

SDO data showed that the explosion, which likely left behind a massive "canyon of fire" on the sun's surface, also released a large coronal mass ejection (CME) — a fast-moving cloud of magnetied plasma and radiation — that collided with Mercury on March 10.

Mercury is often blasted with CMEs due to its proximity to our home star. The small planet has no atmosphere left as a result of this bombardment and is fully exposed to the full force of these solar storms. 

When electrons from CMEs hit Mercury's unprotected surface, they rapidly slow down. This deceleration causes the particles to release energy in the form of X-rays, which scientists can detect from Earth. The result is an aurora-like phenomenon that is visible in X-rays rather than visible light, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Related: 10 solar storms that blew us away in 2023

The gigantic eruption is the latest sign that the explosive peak of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle, known as solar maximum, may have already begun — much earlier than originally forecast.

During solar maximum, solar flares and other types of solar storms erupt more frequently and more powerfully as the sun's magnetic field weakens and eventually flips over. Scientists are already seeing signs of this happening.

In the last month, researchers have seen some of the biggest solar storms of the current cycle, including a monster X-class flare — the most powerful for more than six years — and a plume of plasma 15 times taller than Earth, which erupted from the sun's south pole.

One of the biggest concerns during solar maximum is that researchers can't properly monitor the far side of the sun, which can harbor giant sunspots that unleash surprise solar storms, like the one that just hit Mercury. It's possible that these sunspots could swing round to face Earth as the sun rotates, exposing our planet to flares and CMEs. For example, in January 2023, a hidden sunspot spat out an X-class flare without warning that narrowly avoided Earth.

One secret weapon NASA has up its sleeve to prevent being caught out by these unseeable dark patches is the Perseverance rover, which can sometimes spy on the sun's far side from its home on Mars. But this only works when Earth and Mars are located on opposite sides of the sun. 

They say all good things come in threes, but what about supercharged solar flares? 

A massive, hyperactive sunspot has just unleashed its third X-class solar flare — the most powerful type of solar explosion — in less than 24 hours. The latest flare, which is the largest of the current solar cycle, is the sun's most intense outburst since 2017. And an even more powerful explosion could be on the way.

This flurry of sun-shaking eruptions is a stark reminder that we are on the verge of entering the explosive peak of the solar cycle — the solar maximum — and are likely to see even more intense and potentially destructive solar storms over the next few years.

On Feb. 21, sunspot AR3590 — a massive dark patch several times wider than Earth — spat out two X-class flares in the space of seven hours, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. These explosions had magnitudes of X1.8 and X1.7 respectively. 

But on Feb. 22, the same sunspot unleashed an X6.3 flare around 23 hours after the first, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This was around five times more powerful than the previous two flares, according to NASA.

Not only is this the most powerful explosion of the current solar cycle, which began in 2019, but it is also the most powerful since Sept. 10, 2017, when an X11.8 magnitude flare rocked the sun.

Related: 10 solar storms that blew us away in 2023

None of the flares launched coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — clouds of magnetized plasma that can slam into Earth's magnetic field, or magnetosphere, and trigger disturbances known as geomagnetic storms that can lead to vibrant aurora displays. 

However, all three spat waves of radiation toward us, causing temporary radio blackouts as they slammed into our planet's protective shield. There were rumors that the first two flares were also responsible for causing cell coverage outages from providers AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. But this was likely not the case. 

But we are not yet in the clear. AR3590 has a particularly unstable magnetic field that "harbors energy for more X-class explosions," Spaceweather.com reported. The sunspot only recently emerged on the sun's near-side to Earth and will be pointing at us for the next week, so if it does have any more violent outbursts it could hurl a substantial CME right at us.

If this were to happen, it could not only trigger auroras but also disrupt communications, interfere with infrastructure on the planet's surface and knock satellites out of the sky. 

Just the beginning 

Solar flares become more frequent and powerful during and in the lead-up to the solar maximum because the sun's magnetic field lines get tangled up and frequently snap, triggering explosive eruptions. 

Last year, there were 13 X-class flares, which was up from seven in 2022 and two in 2021, according to SpaceWeatherLive.com. Now, after AR3590's triple flares, we have already had five X-class flares in 2024 and we haven't even hit March.

The intensity of these flares is also on the rise. Within the last three months, the record for the current solar cycle's largest flare has now been broken three times following an X2.8 flare on Dec. 14 and an X5 flare on Dec. 31.

Scientists originally predicted that the solar maximum would arrive sometime in 2025 and be weaker compared to past solar activity peaks. However, after numerous warning signs that this wasn't the case, researchers updated their forecasts late last year. 

Experts now believe that the solar maximum will officially arrive in the first half of this year and be as active as past maximums. It may have already begun, but we won't know for sure until we near the end of the solar cycle.

If the solar maximum progresses as expected, there could be many more powerful X-class flares over the next few years. If they launch CMEs toward Earth, then there could be some serious consequences. 

A mysterious widespread cellphone outage has coincided with the eruption of two powerful "X-class" solar flares from a "dangerous" sunspot. Yet scientists warn that the two events are probably unconnected.

The two intense flares burst from the sunspot AR3590 Wednesday (Feb. 21) at 6:07 p.m. ET (23:07 GMT) and Thursday (Feb. 22) at 1:32 a.m. ET (06:32 GMT), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

After traveling to Earth at the speed of light, the flares caused successive shortwave radio frequency blackouts that lasted one or two hours. The first was over the western U.S. and Pacific Ocean, and the second was over the Indian Ocean.

Related: Watch the 1st X-class solar flare of 2024 erupt from the sun in explosive fashion

Hours later at 11a.m. ET (16:00 GMT) , multiple cellular providers — including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile — reported disruption to their service across the U.S. for over 70,000 users, according to the disruption tracking website Downdetector.com. The lack of forthcoming official explanation caused some news outlets to blame the outage on the flares. 

But because many of the coverage drops were experienced primarily by AT&T customers and came much later and further from when and where the flares hit, solar scientists say terrestrial explanations are much more likely sources of the disruption.

"Some people are attributing cell network outages (AT&T, Verizon) in the U.S to last night's X-class Solar Flare," Ryan French, a solar astrophysicist at the National Solar Observatory, wrote on X, formerly called Twitter. "However, flares only cause radio degradation on the dayside of the Earth. As you can see below, the U.S was not affected by the event. So it's just a coincidence!"

"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," NOAA's space weather prediction center wrote in a statement.

The sun is a gigantic ball of plasma whose charged ions swirl over its surface to create powerful magnetic fields. As magnetic-field lines cannot cross each other, sometimes these fields knot before suddenly snapping to launch bursts of radiation called solar flares or enormous plumes of solar material called coronal mass ejections into space.

NOAA classifies solar flares on a five-level scale (A, B, C, M and X) based on the intensity of the X-rays they release, with each level having 10 times the intensity of the last. The two flares were registered as X1.7 and X1.8, making them very intense.

Once they arrived at Earth, the X-rays and ultraviolet radiation produced by the flares ionized atoms in the upper atmosphere, making it impossible to bounce high-frequency radio waves from them and creating a radio blackout. Radio blackouts occur over the areas lit by the sun during the time of the flare and last one or two hours.

While no official statement has been made about what caused the outages, some have speculated it may have been caused by a problem with the cloud services primarily used by AT&T.

"The most likely cause is a cloud misconfiguration," Lee McKnight, an associate professor in the iSchool at Syracuse University, told TechRadar. "Which is a fancy word for saying human error. I was reviewing this exact issue in class yesterday."

Solar activity, which rises and falls according to a roughly 11-year cycle, has been especially high recently, with sunspot counts nearly doubling those predicted by NOAA.

The increased activity has sent waves of high-energy plasma and X-ray bursts slamming into Earth's magnetic field, downing satellites, triggering radio blackouts and causing auroras as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon.

And the most intense activity may still lie ahead. The sun's activity is projected to climb steadily, reaching an overall maximum in 2025, before decreasing again. However, some scientists have suggested that the intense waves of solar eruption could mean that the maximum is already here.

A gigantic plume of plasma recently exploded from the sun's south pole, where solar eruptions almost never occur. The explosion, which a photographer captured in stunning detail, is another telltale sign that the sun is about to enter its most active phase — the solar maximum. 

The rare phenomenon occurred on Feb. 17, when a solar flare exploded from a sunspot near the sun's south pole, releasing a gigantic column of ionized gas, or plasma, that towered around 124,300 miles (200,000 kilometers) above the solar surface — around 15 times taller than Earth, Spaceweather.com reported. The plasma eventually snapped away from the sun and hurtled into space as a gigantic cloud, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME).  

Astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau captured a highly detailed composite image of the plume before it broke away from the solar surface. "The plasma column was so large, I had to rotate the camera to fit it into the frame," Poupeau told Spaceweather.com. "It was truly a wonderful spectacle." 

This stellar blast was extremely unusual because it erupted from the sun's south pole: Most solar flares erupt from sunspots on or around the sun's equator and almost never from near the magnetic poles, because the poles are where the sun's magnetic field is strongest, which normally suppresses sunspot formation. 

Due to the orientation of the flare, the CME was directed away from Earth and the rest of the planets, which all orbit the sun on the same plane.

Related: 15 signs the sun is gearing up for its explosive peak — the solar maximum

The unusual eruption was likely triggered by what scientists call a polar crown filament (PCF) — a loop of magnetism that circles the sun's magnetic poles, according to Spaceweather.com. The plasma plume that was spat out by the flare is known as a polar crown prominence (PCP).

PCPs become more common during the solar maximum — the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle. During this phase, PCFs shrink in size, "like a tightening noose around their respective poles," Spaceweather.com reported. As these magnetic crowns constrict, they "strangle" the nearby magnetic fields, making them more likely to explode.

Experts believe the solar maximum will arrive at some point in the next few months — earlier than originally predicted. 

As we approach solar maximum, more and more weird phenomena are occurring at the sun's poles: In February 2023, a PCP broke off from the sun and got caught in a PCF, creating a swirling plasma vortex that raged around the sun's north pole for eight hours. And in March last year, a PCP collapsed in on itself, creating a gigantic plasma waterfall near the sun's south pole, which was shortly followed by an enormous plume of rotating plasma, known as a "solar tornado," near the solar north pole that lasted for three days.

The sun unleashed a powerful X-class solar flare on Friday (Feb. 9), peaking at 8:10 a.m. (1310 GMT) and triggering shortwave radio blackouts across South America, Africa and the Southern Atlantic. 

The solar flare erupted from sunspot AR3576 — the same sunspot that put on a fiery show on Feb. 5 with an M-class flare and plasma eruption. 

Luckily for us, the sunspot moved beyond the sun's limb yesterday (Feb. 8), placing Earth outside of its direct firing line. "Goodness knows how big this flare would have been if it had happened this side of the sun," solar physicist Keith Strong wrote in a post on X.

The monstrous solar flare was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a large release of plasma and magnetic field from the sun.

"There was a clear eruption with a coronal wave suggesting a very fast CME to the west, " said heliophysicist Alex Young in a post on X. 

If a CME hits Earth it can cause disturbances to our magnetic field and lead to geomagnetic storms which can be troublesome for Earth-orbiting satellites but a delight to aurora chasers on the hunt for dramatic displays. 

Due to the location of the sunspot so far south, it is unlikely that any CME from sunspot AR3576 will strike Earth directly; it is more likely to pass straight under us.

While we may not be in the direct firing line, it doesn't mean we are not affected. The X-flare caused extensive radio blackouts due to the strong pulse of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation sent barrelling toward Earth at the time of the eruption. Traveling at the speed of light, the radiation reached Earth in just over eight minutes and ionized the upper layer of Earth's atmosphere — the thermosphere — triggering shortwave radio blackouts on the sun-lit portion of Earth at the time including South America, Africa and the Southern Atlantic. 

Solar flares are triggered when magnetic energy builds up in the solar atmosphere and is released in an intense burst of electromagnetic radiation. They are categorized by size into lettered groups, with X-class being the most powerful. Then there are M-class flares that are 10 times smaller than X-class flares, then C-class, B-class and finally A-class flares which are too weak to significantly affect Earth. Within each class, numbers from 1 to 10 (and beyond, for X-class flares) denote a flare's relative strength. The recent flare clocked in at X.3.38 according to Spaceweatherlive.com using data from NASA's GOES-16 satellite.

The sun is becoming incredibly active as it approaches the most active part of its approximately 11-year solar cycle known as the "solar maximum." Just yesterday (Feb. 8) a giant sunspot crackling with M-class solar flares turned to face Earth. The sunspot — AR3576 — is so big it was seen by the Perseverance Rover on the surface of Mars. Could we see a similarly powerful X-flare eruption from the "Martian sunspot"? Only time will tell.

Solar and space weather scientists are monitoring the sun carefully as energetic solar flares and CMEs can be problematic for satellites in space and electronic technology here on Earth. Scientists at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center analyze sunspot regions daily to assess the threats. The World Data Center for the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations at the Royal Observatory of Belgium also tracks sunspots and records the highs and lows of the solar cycle to evaluate solar activity and improve space weather forecasting. NASA also has a fleet of spacecraft — known collectively as the Heliophysics Systems Observatory (HSO) — designed to study the sun and its influence on the solar system, including the effects of space weather.

Originally published on Space.com.

Even the sun is not above launching a few New Year's Eve fireworks, it seems. In the final hours of Dec. 31, 2023, satellites near Earth detected a gargantuan X5-class solar flare erupting from our star — ending the year with the single most powerful solar explosion seen since 2017.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the flare was accompanied by a gargantuan blob of high-speed solar particles known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), which may graze Earth's magnetic field today (Jan. 2), possibly triggering widespread auroras across the sky and minor geomagnetic storms. Typically, the best places to view auroras are near Earth's poles, but CMEs can push those auroras to much lower latitudes than usual.

Solar flares occur when magnetic fields on the sun become too tangled and snap like rubber bands, kicking up powerful waves of radiation that stream across space at high speeds. X-class flares are the most powerful type of solar flare, and they have been known to interfere with satellites, radio systems and power grids when the flares' accompanying radiation bursts pass over Earth.

The Dec. 31 X5 flare was the strongest of 2023, soundly beating an enormous X2.8 flare that launched from the exact same spot on the sun on Dec. 14. At the time, that X2.8 flare was also declared the most powerful flare since Sept. 10, 2017, when a gargantuan X8.2-class flare erupted from the sun, according to NOAA.

The New Year's Eve flare was also the strongest of the current solar cycle — solar cycle 25, which began in 2019 and is predicted to peak this year. The sun follows an 11-year cycle of activity, which reaches a peak called solar maximum about halfway through. Although the current cycle's peak was initially predicted to hit in 2025 and be relatively mild, an onslaught of solar activity in 2023 has prompted scientists to revise their predictions.

Solar maximum is now predicted to hit sometime in 2024. And if last year's intense solar activity is any indication, the peak will be a powerful one; in addition to these powerful flares, 2023 also witnessed the most powerful geomagnetic storm in 20 years, as well as a 20-year high in the number of sunspots observed in one month.

The sun recently unleashed an "almost X-class" solar flare that was only fractionally less powerful than one of the sun's most powerful explosions. This flare has already bombarded us with radiation and unleashed a coronal mass ejection (CME) that will likely slam into Earth today (Dec. 1), resulting in strong geomagnetic storms and widespread auroras, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

Solar flares are essentially large explosions that are triggered when magnetic fields around sunspots snap and fling plasma into space. On Nov. 28, a large flare erupted from a dark patch near the sun's equator. Solar orbiters measured the flare as a 9.8 magnitude M-class, which is just below the threshold of X-class flares — the most powerful class of solar flare, Spaceweather.com reported. (Solar flare classes include A, B, C, M and X, with each class being at least 10 times more powerful than the previous one. X-class flares are the equivalent of a magnitude 10 M-class flare and above.)

The supercharged flare spat out an initial wave of solar radiation that smashed into Earth on Nov. 29 and triggered minor radio blackouts as it rattled our planet's magnetic shield, or magnetosphere, and further ionized the top part of our atmosphere, EarthSky reported.

The flare also unleashed a CME, or fast-moving cloud of magnetized plasma, which shot out of the sun at around 1.8 million mph (2.9 million km/h), according to Spaceweather.com. The trajectory of the CME suggests it is likely to hit Earth on Dec. 1, according to Spaceweather.com. 

Related: 15 dazzling images of the sun

If the CME does hit Earth, it will be repelled by the magnetosphere. But the collision will temporarily weaken the magnetosphere, causing a geomagnetic storm that could trigger vibrant aurora displays that light up the night sky. The storm will likely be strong (G3 class, which is the 3rd-strongest on NOAA's 5-class scale) and will result in widespread auroras, but likely not pose a threat to satellites or ground-based infrastructure. 

On its way to Earth, the CME will likely cannibalize two smaller CMEs  that were spat out by a smaller flare on Nov. 27, which could power up the resulting storm, according to NOAA.

Solar flares have become more frequent and intense throughout this year. There have already been 11 X-class flares since January — more than the last five years put together, according to SpaceWeatherLive.com. 

At least three of these superpowered solar explosions have launched CMEs that have hit Earth: The first came from the first X-class flare of the year in early January; the second hit us in February and also unleashed a "solar tsunami" as it erupted; and the most recent CME exploded from an enormous sunspot 10 times wider than Earth in July.

Increasing solar activity has also been visible in other ways, including an increase in the number of sunspots peppering the solar surface and rising temperatures in Earth's upper atmosphere, which is soaking up more solar radiation than normal. 

This ramp-up in activity is the result of the sun approaching the explosive peak in its roughly 11-year solar cycle, known as the solar maximum, which scientists now believe will arrive sometime next year. 

Update: This article was edited on Dec. 1 to incorporate the latest forecast from NOAA.

Scientists have spotted a stunning "aurora-like" display of crackling radio waves over the surface of the sun that is strikingly similar to the Northern Lights on Earth. 

The solar lightshow took place roughly 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) above a sunspot — a magnetically warped dark patch on our star's surface. Astronomers on Earth detected the bursts of radio waves over the course of a week.

Scientists have detected aurora-like radio signals from distant stars in the past, but this is the first time they've seen a signal of this kind from our own sun. They published their findings Nov. 13 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Related: Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought. How dangerous will the sun's chaotic peak be?

"This is quite unlike the typical, transient solar radio bursts typically lasting minutes or hours," lead author Sijie Yu, an astronomer at New Jersey Institute of Technology's Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (NJIT-CSTR), said in a statement. "It's an exciting discovery that has the potential to alter our comprehension of stellar magnetic processes."

On Earth, auroras are the result of energetic solar debris zipping through the atmosphere near the poles,where the protective magnetic field is weakest, and agitating oxygen and nitrogen molecules. This causes the molecules to release energy in the form of light, tracing rippling curtains of color across the sky. 

Solar debris is usually fired away from the sun when magnetic fields around  sunspots knot into kinks before suddenly snapping. The resulting release of energy launches bursts of radiation called solar flares and explosive jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). 

By pointing a radio telescope at a sunspot on our star's surface, the researchers detected an aurora-like emission above it, which they believe is the result of electrons from solar flares being accelerated along the sunspot's powerful magnetic field lines.

"However, unlike the Earth's auroras, these sunspot aurora emissions occur at frequencies ranging from hundreds of thousands of kHz [kilohertz] to roughly 1 million kHz — a direct result of the sunspot's magnetic field being thousands of times stronger than Earth's," Yu said. For comparison, a typical aurora on Earth emits light at frequencies between 100 to 500 kHz.

The researchers say their discovery has opened up new ways to study the sun's activity, and they have begun poring through archival data to find hidden evidence of past solar auroras.

"We're beginning to piece together the puzzle of how energetic particles and magnetic fields interact in a system with the presence of long-lasting starspots," study co-author Surajit Mondal, a solar physicist at NJIT, said in the statement. "Not just on our own Sun but also on stars far beyond our solar system."

What it is: A solar flare exploding on the sun's surface

When it was taken: Oct. 28, 2003

Where it is: The sun, around 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth

Why it's so special: During the spooky season of 2003, the sun spit out an unusually powerful series of solar flares, known as the "Halloween solar storms." The most powerful of these flares (pictured above) exploded from the sun's surface on Oct. 28 and launched a high-speed burst of electrically charged particles, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), that smashed into Earth the next day.

The monstrous eruption was an X-class flare — the most powerful class the sun is capable of producing — with an estimated magnitude of 45, which remains the most powerful in modern databases, according to NASA. (The flare was too powerful to be accurately detected by scientific equipment at the time, so its magnitude was calculated afterward.)

The plume of plasma erupted from a sunspot wider than 13 Earths, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The resulting CME temporarily knocked out half of the satellites orbiting Earth at the time and forced astronauts on the International Space Station to take cover from the radiation.

On Earth, the resulting geomagnetic storm raged for three days, creating temporary radio blackouts across large parts of the globe and even causing permanent damage to electrical infrastructure in some places. Auroras were also clearly visible as far south as California, Texas and Florida, according to NOAA.

Experts say the superpowered storm could have been the largest since the Carrington Event in 1859, which, excluding inexplicably powerful ancient Miyake events, is the most powerful known solar storm in human history.

If a solar storm as large as the 2003 behemoth hit Earth today, the repercussions could be much more terrifying because there are thousands more satellites in orbit and we are much more reliant on them than we were back then.

All indications suggest that the sun's upcoming period of peak activity, the solar maximum, will be the strongest in decades.

Earth was bombarded with an enormous dose of cosmic radiation more than 14,000 years ago, newly discovered tree rings reveal — and researchers suspect it was caused by an enormous, superpowered solar storm, the likes of which we have never seen before. 

In a new study published Oct. 9 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences, researchers analyzed tree rings cut from subfossil, or partially fossilized, tree stumps in the French Alps. The ancient trees, which were preserved by the sediment of a river bed, all have high levels of radiocarbon in a single year's ring dating to roughly 14,300 years ago. 

Radiocarbon, or carbon-14, is an isotope of carbon with extra neutrons and is produced when cosmic rays hit nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere. High radiocarbon levels in a tree ring suggest there was a spike in cosmic rays around that time. The time the spikes occurred in these rings matches findings from ice cores that were recently unearthed in Greenland, which showed high levels of the element beryllium from the same period. Beryllium is most commonly created by cosmic rays slamming into the nuclei of other elements.

Researchers think the radiation spike came from a massive solar storm, most likely triggered by a fast-moving cloud of magnetized plasma and radiation known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) that was launched into space by a humongous solar flare. What the gigantic storm would have looked like is beyond our current comprehension.

If true, it would make the storm "the biggest ever identified" coming from the sun, the researchers wrote in an email statement. "A similar solar storm today would be catastrophic for modern technological society," they added.

Related: 10 solar storms that blew us away in 2022

The researchers are calling the ancient solar storm a Miyake event — a gigantic type of solar storm that has never been directly observed but leaves evidence in the fossil record. So far, at least six but potentially up to eight other Miyake events have been detected from tree rings or geological evidence across the globe, with the most recent occurring approximately 1,030 years ago.

The largest directly-observed solar storm was the Carrington Event, which erupted from a monstrous sunspot on the solar surface in 1859. This storm was not capable of producing the levels of radiation seen in the tree rings, but it did produce an enormous, bright flare that was visible to astronomers on Earth for around five minutes and had the equivalent energy of around 10 billion 1-megaton nuclear bombs.

Miyake events are believed to be "several orders of magnitude" greater than the Carrington Event, the researchers wrote. Scientists think the most recent Miyake event was around 80 times more powerful than the Carrington Event, Live Science previously reported. But the newly discovered superflare could have been twice as powerful again, researchers wrote.

If an equally powerful solar storm smashed into Earth today it would be disastrous.

"Such super storms could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts lasting months," study co-author Tim Heaton, a radiocarbon expert at the University of Leeds in England, said in the statement. "They could also result in permanent damage to the satellites that we all rely on for navigation and telecommunication, leaving them unusable." 

Related: Could a solar storm ever destroy Earth?

Miyake events may have also played an important role in our evolution. Past research suggested that cosmic rays spat out by superflares could have sparked the beginning of life on Earth.

We have no real idea what Miyake events look like, or if we would be able to tell if one was coming before it was too late. Similar superflares have been observed erupting from distant stars, but this provides limited information about our own sun. 

The new discovery highlights that "we still have much to learn about the behavior of the sun and the dangers it poses to society on Earth," the researchers wrote.

The sun is currently nearing a peak in its roughly 11-year solar cycle, known as the solar maximum, when solar activity such as solar flares and CMEs become much more common. There is no indication that this increases the extremely long odds of the sun producing another superflare. However, researchers have predicted that Miyake events could occur roughly every 1,000 years, so it may not be too long before we witness another one. 

A mysterious explosion on the sun's far side has launched a blob of plasma and radiation that is forecast to slam into Mars. If the solar storm hits the Red Planet, it could trigger faint ultraviolet auroras and potentially erode part of the Martian atmosphere, according to experts.  

Earth-orbiting satellites detected the surprise explosion on Aug. 26 on the far side of the sun. Further analysis revealed the explosion was an M-class solar flare, the second most powerful type of solar eruption. However, researchers are still unsure what triggered the explosion as there were no prior signs of sunspots — dark, highly magnetized patches on the sun's surface that solar flares are launched from — near where the blast originated, according to Spaceweather.com. 

Solar flares can occasionally launch coronal mass ejections (CME) — fast-moving clouds of magnetized plasma and radiation — into space. Researchers detected a CME in the wake of the M-class flare but didn't closely monitor it because it posed no threat to Earth. But in the last few days, scientists have realized the CME will likely hit Mars on Sept. 1.   

The CME could create auroras over the Red Planet if it hits, according to Spaceweather.com, although they will appear faint.

Related: Massive solar explosion felt on Earth, the moon and Mars simultaneously for the 1st time ever

On Earth, auroras occur when radiation from solar storms or solar wind is absorbed by gas in the upper atmosphere, which excites the molecules and causes them to release energy in the form of light. This usually only happens near Earth's poles where our planet's magnetosphere, or protective magnetic field, is weakest.

But Mars has a very thin atmosphere, with around 100 times less gas than Earth's, so its auroral displays are very weak in comparison and usually only show up in ultraviolet wavelengths. The Red Planet also lacks a proper magnetosphere because of its geologically dead core, meaning the planet is instead covered by patchy, mushroom-shaped magnetic fields. As a result, Martian auroras can appear almost anywhere on the planet, according to NASA. Because of the planet's weak magnetic shielding, major CMEs could further strip away the planet's faint atmosphere, according to Spaceweather.com.

Scientists have spotted major auroras on Mars at least three times. In 2022, the United Arab Emirates Mars Mission's Hope orbiter spotted bizarre, worm-like auroras zigzagging across the planet. In 2014, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft detected auroras in Mars' northern hemisphere, and in 2004, the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft spotted auroras in the planet's southern hemisphere, according to NASA.  

However, research from 2019 suggests that Mars may have much more frequent and faint auroras, known as proton auroras, that are triggered by solar wind.  

Major Martian auroras could become more likely over the next few years as the sun enters the solar maximum — the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle, when the number of sunspots increases and solar flares become more common. The solar maximum was originally forecast to begin sometime in 2025, but in June, Live Science reported that the solar maximum could arrive sooner and be more powerful than originally expected, possibly arriving by the end of 2023 or early 2024.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has spent the last few months spying on the sun's far side in search of big sunspots that could pose a risk to Earth. But the rover failed to see the mysterious explosion that launched the latest CME directly toward Mars.

The sun's intense brightness makes it unsafe for us to get a detailed view of it by traditional means. So, for over 200 years, humans have relied on different modes of photography to safely glimpse the nuances of our star. Now, a range of telescopes and imagers capture the details, the violence and the beauty of the solar system's heart. Here are 15 of the most dazzling examples.

1. The sun's many colors

This iridescent orb is an ultraviolet image of the sun taken by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar and Heliospheric Observatory's extreme ultraviolet telescope. The blue represents temperatures more than 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius), yellow is 2.7 million F (1.5 million C) and red is 3.6 million F (2 million C).

Related: Mysterious waves of magnetism may explain why the sun's atmosphere is hotter than physicists thought possible

2. A violent ejection

This extreme ultraviolet image captures a coronal mass ejection (CME), which occurs when a cloud of highly magnetized plasma erupts from the sun, expelling the plasma and magnetic field into space. In this image, some of the solar filament falls back to the sun while much of it escapes into space.

3. Burning rain

When million-degree plasma in the sun's atmosphere cools, it begins to fall. The stunning stream of plasma raining down to the surface — captured here by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) — is called coronal rain.

Related: Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought. How dangerous will the sun's chaotic peak be?

 4. Star loops

This image from Nov. 29, 2020, taken by NASA's SDO, displays with stunning clarity an arcade of coronal loops. Coronal loops are "ropey curving strands of plasma that appear as arcs above the sun's surface," according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

5. The quiet sun

The SDO observes the sun with a variety of instruments and in many different wavelengths. This image shows light at 171 angstroms, a wavelength often used to view the sun's atmosphere when it's quiet, when no solar flares or CMEs are happening.

 6. The largest prominence

According to ESA, this solar prominence— a structure of tangled magnetic-field lines that keep dense concentrations of solar plasma suspended above the sun's surface — is the largest ever solar prominence captured in a single image of the entire solar disk.

7. A flurry of flares 

This image is from a massive solar eruption in 2017 that included a medium solar flare, an intense CME and a flurry of solar energetic particles. These energetic particles can interact with Earth's magnetosphere and interfere with radio transmissions. The explosions created a solar storm that interrupted radio transmissions at high latitudes for three days. 

8. Sun-o'-lantern

In October 2014, the active regions of the sun created the seasonally appropriate appearance of a jack-o'-lantern. The image combines wavelengths of 171 and 193 angstroms, which appear as gold and yellow, to create an especially Halloween-y look.  

9. Windy chasms

From this golden image, we get a peek at two coronal holes. These are the areas that appear dark in extreme ultraviolet images, because they are cooler, less-dense regions than the surrounding plasma, and magnetically open. It's from these regions that solar winds cascade into the solar system. 

10. An ethereal opening

This ethereal image captures another coronal hole that grew to a massive size in 2015. The open magnetic area went halfway across the sun, meaning it was about 50 times the size of Earth.

11. The mystery heats up

These images show the sun in a variety of wavelengths. They are arranged by temperature, from the 10,800 F (6,000 C) surface of the sun to the 50 million F (10 million C) outer atmosphere. Scientists are still trying to understand why the sun's outer atmosphere is so much hotter than the surface.

12.  A solar mosaic

This stunning view of our star is a mosaic made of smaller images from NuSTAR, a telescope that usually stares deep into space in search of X-rays from black holes and supernovas. But it can capture small pieces of the sun, too. The blue-white regions mark the most energetic areas. The image also captures microflares, which heat and feed the larger flares. 

13. Hello, Venus

This simple image of Venus' passage in front of the sun, called a Venus transit, is made all the more beautiful because it's so rare. Because of Earth's tilted orbit, Venus' journey won't be visible like this again until 2117.

14. An intimate explosion

This stunning close-up captures a violent eruption in 2012. A long solar filament that had been suspended in the sun's atmosphere exploded into space. The CME hurled into space at 900 miles per second (1,450 kilometers per second).

15. The sun in full glory

This ESA image from 2022 is a mosaic of 25 images. It's one of the most detailed and comprehensive looks we've ever had of the star next door. 

Related: Sun's fiery surface revealed in amazing composite of 90,000 images

Scientists scoping out a star system in the constellation Orion have witnessed one of the most gargantuan and powerful stellar flares ever seen.

Dubbed a "superflare," the enormous blast of stellar radiation is 10 times more massive than anything ever witnessed erupting from the sun, according to new research published in The Astrophysical Journal. 

While the mechanism behind these monster flares still isn't well understood, the new research suggests that superflares originate from stars that are highly magnetically active. These superflares may be accompanied by enormous eruptions of charged particles that could devastate life on any planets in their firing line, the study authors wrote. (Fortunately for us, Earth is not one of those planets.)

In their new research, the astronomers targeted a star system called V1355 Orionis, which is about 400 light-years from Earth and features two stars orbiting each other. These stars belong to a class of stars known to harbor many sunspots — dark, planet-size regions that form as the result of intense electromagnetic activity — and that have been tied to other observed superflares. 

In general, stellar flares occur when magnetic-field lines in a star's atmosphere tangle, snap and reconnect, releasing a powerful gout of radiation that's visible across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. On the sun, flares may be accompanied by towering loops of plasma, known as prominences, that can rise tens of thousands of miles above the sun's surface. If this solar plasma launches quickly enough, it can break free of the sun and become a coronal mass ejection (CME) — an enormous blob of high-energy particles that can knock satellites out of orbit and short-circuit power grids on Earth, if our planet happens to be in the blob's path. 

Combining observations from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the Seimei Telescope in Japan, the researchers studied the distant star system in multiple wavelengths of light to capture the most complete picture possible of the superflare's evolution. 

They found that the flare began with one of the most powerful stellar eruptions ever seen — a high-velocity prominence that burst out of one of the stars at more than 2.2 million mph (3.5 million km/h). This blast far exceeded the star's escape velocity, launching trillions of tons of electrically charged matter outward into space in what may be one of the largest CMEs ever observed, the authors wrote.

It's not certain how, exactly, such a powerful CME would impact life on any hapless planets that got in the way — but the researchers said the effects would be far more catastrophic than those associated with even the worst CMEs to hit Earth. 

Ultimately, this mega-flare's discovery is less a cautionary tale for our planet than it is a caveat in the search for life on other worlds: Planets around magnetically hyper star systems like V1355 Orionis may not be the best places to look.

A beautiful and ghostly "butterfly" has launched from the sun, unfurling its ethereal, gossamer wings in two expanding arcs of plasma. 

Astronomers spotted the unusual solar eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), exploding from the farside of the sun Friday (March 10), according to spaceweather.com.

CMEs originate from sunspots, regions on the sun's surface where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electrical charges, form knots before abruptly snapping. The resulting release of energy can eject gigantic plumes of solar material from the sun's surface out into the solar system. Once launched, CMEs travel millions of miles per hour, sweeping up charged particles from the solar wind to form a giant, combined wavefront.

Related: 10 solar storms that blew us away in 2022

"Most CMEs look like a smoke ring or a halo. This one was different," according to an update from spaceweather.com. "We will never know what kind of explosion gave rise to its insectoid shape, because the blast site was on the farside of the sun. The sun itself blocked our view."

This particular sun belch is not expected to strike Earth, but it is predicted to barrel into Mercury, according to NASA. Once it hits the closest planet to the sun, the CME could potentially smash through Mercury's weak magnetic field, tearing off some of the planet's surface and dumping it onto its comet-like tail. Other parts of this scoured and uplifted material will be briefly suspended above Mercury, giving the small planet a momentary atmosphere.

Although our planet's much stronger magnetic field can absorb the high-speed barrage of solar debris, CMEs that strike Earth can still cause impressive geomagnetic storms. During these storms, Earth's magnetic field gets compressed slightly by waves of highly energetic particles. These particles trickle down magnetic-field lines near the poles and agitate molecules in the atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light to create colorful auroras known as the northern lights.

More intense geomagnetic storms can disrupt our planet's magnetic field powerfully enough to send satellites tumbling to Earth, and scientists have warned that extreme geomagnetic storms could even cripple the internet.

The largest solar storm in recent history was the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly as much energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles fried telegraph systems around the world and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.

Scientists warn that if a similar event were to happen today, it would cause trillions of dollars' worth of damage, trigger widespread blackouts and endanger thousands of lives. A solar storm in 1989 released a billion-ton gas plume that caused a blackout across Quebec, NASA reported.

Scientists anticipate that the sun's activity will steadily climb for the next few years, reaching an overall maximum in 2025 before decreasing again.

Scientists have spotted an enormous, 'alien' comet streaking straight towards the sun. 

The 3.7 mile-wide (6 kilometers) space iceball, called 96P/Machholz 1, is thought to have come from somewhere outside our solar system, and is being monitored by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft as it zips toward our star inside the orbit of Mercury, leaving an icy trail in its wake. 

Comet tails are primarily composed of gas, which trickles behind the frozen clumps of ice and gas as they are heated by the sun’s radiation. In 2008, an analysis of the material shed by 150 comets found that 96P/Machholz 1 contained less than 1.5% of the expected levels of the chemical cyanogen, while also being low in carbon — leading astronomers to conclude that it could be an interloper from another solar system. Now, its plunge towards the sun might reveal even more of its secrets. 

Related: Stunning images capture the moment a green comet's tail is blasted away by the sun

"96P is a very atypical comet, both in composition and in behavior, so we never know exactly what we might see," Karl Battams, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC, told spaceweather.com. "Hopefully we can get some beautiful science out of this and share [it] with everyone as soon as we can."

David Machholz first spotted the eponymous comet in 1986 using a homemade cardboard telescope. Most comets that fall towards the sun tend to be smaller than 32 feet (10 meters) wide, and consequently get burned up as they approach our star. 

But the gigantic size of Machholz 1 (it is more than two-thirds the height of Mount Everest) appears to protect it from complete evaporation, and the SOHO has spotted the comet making five close passes around the sun since its discovery. The icy interloper's closest approach to the sun will come on Tuesday (Jan 31.) when it will near our star at a distance three times closer than Mercury.

The comet may have found itself on its strange orbit after being ejected from its original solar system by the gravity of a giant planet. Then, after a considerable amount of time wandering the cosmos, an accidental rendezvous with Jupiter could have bent its trajectory to ensnare it around our sun. Other theories also suggest that the comet might not be alien, but may have formed in poorly-understood regions of the solar system or had its cyanogen blasted off by repeat journeys around the sun.

SOHO has spotted more than 3,000 comets since its December 1995 launch, although the spacecraft’s primary mission is to observe the sun for violent eruptions called coronal mass ejections, or solar flares that can cause geomagnetic storms on Earth. The most powerful of these storms can disrupt our planet's magnetic field enough to send satellites tumbling to Earth, and scientists have warned that extreme geomagnetic storms could even cripple the internet.

 Solar flares, powerful bursts of radiation from the sun, are often preceded by a pre-flare spark, scientists have discovered. The finding could lead to better predictions of solar storms, which can disrupt power grids and communications systems on Earth.

The scientists made the discovery after digging into years of data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a satellite that's been observing the sun since 2010. Since the 1970s and '80s, researchers had witnessed these pre-flare flashes, using tools such as ground-based observatories, so there was a lot of anecdotal evidence that the flashes and flares were related, KD Leka, a senior research scientist at NorthWest Research Associates (NWRA) in Boulder, Colorado, told Live Science. But those researchers didn't have instruments like SDO, which is constantly watching and recording the sun's activity from space. 

"Images of [the sun] have definitely been helping scientists and forecasters understand when an active region is likely to be flare-productive," Leka said. 

In a new set of papers published in The Astrophysical Journal, Leka and her team combed through nearly a decade of SDO data, zooming in on active regions of the sun known as sunspots. These dark areas are places where the sun's magnetic field is particularly active due to contortions deeper within the star. The contortions cause the sun's magnetic field to twist and tangle. And when those magnetic-field lines snap back into their original form, an enormous burst of energy erupts from the surface. 

These explosions can manifest as either a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection (CME). Solar flares are intense surges of X-rays and energy that shine in all directions. The electromagnetic energy moves at the speed of light and can arrive at Earth within 8 minutes. CMEs, by contrast, are explosions of highly charged particles that erupt in a particular direction. They move more slowly, at 155 to 1,900 miles per second (250 to 3,000 kilometers per second); it can take several days for a CME to sweep over Earth.

Both kinds of explosions can cause damage to power systems and telecommunications on Earth, but they are generally harmless to humans and other living things.

In thousands of terabytes of data from SDO, Leka and her team found that solar flares are often associated with a moment of brightness, like when you strike a match and it sparks before igniting. These sparks occurred up to one day before flares erupted from the same region of the sun, the authors found.

The findings, while exciting for our understanding of solar physics, do not mean that scientists can now predict solar flares, Leka said. Think of it like forecasting a volcanic eruption — earthquakes near an active volcano tell scientists that underground magma is on the move and could be leading to an eruption. So scientists monitor earthquakes and tweak models to predict when an eruption might occur. But no single earthquake is a predictor of a volcanic eruption.

"Down the road, combining all this information from the surface up through the corona [the sun's outer atmosphere] should allow forecasters to make better predictions about when and where solar flares will happen," study co-author Karin Dissauer, a research scientist at NWRA, said in a statement.

For now, the research has spawned new questions for Leka, such as how the dynamics of the sun's magnetic field are connected to processes that occur deep within the sun and how to combine data from both those regions to help scientists predict solar eruptions. 

A massive explosion on the far side of the sun recently spat out a potential X-class flare — one of the most powerful solar flares the sun is capable of producing. The resulting solar storm will narrowly miss Earth, but the sunspot responsible for belching it out could soon be pointed directly at our planet. 

The epic eruption was detected on Jan. 3 by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), an Earth-orbiting spacecraft co-operated by NASA and the European Space Agency. SOHO spotted a bright stream of plasma, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), that emerged from the sun's southeastern limb, according to Spaceweather.com.

The CME was likely given off by a hidden far-side flare and registered as a C-class event, the third highest class of solar flares. (Solar flare classes include A, B, C, M and X, with each class being at least 10 times more powerful than the previous one.) But based on the size and strength of the visible CME, experts believe the hidden outburst that birthed it was probably large enough to be designated as an X-class flare, Spaceweather.com reported. But this has not been officially confirmed. 

The most powerful X-class flares can erupt from the sun with an equivalent force of around a billion hydrogen bombs, according to NASA. If one of these flares hit Earth head on it could trigger widespread radio and electricity blackouts on the side of the planet facing the sun and cause damage to satellites in orbit around Earth. The resulting auroras would be so strong they could even give nearby airplane passengers small doses of radiation, according to NASA. 

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) modeled the solar storm given off by the most recent X-class flare and found that it would narrowly miss Earth over the next few days, according to Spaceweather.com. However, that doesn't mean we will stay in the clear for long.

Related: 10 solar storms that blew us away in 2022

Astronomers believe the enormous flare was emitted from a sunspot — dark, planet-sized regions that form in the sun’s lower atmosphere as the result of magnetic disturbances — known as AR3163, which rotated onto the far side of the sun around two weeks ago after spitting out a flurry of mild CMEs on the sun's near side. Based on the potential power of the hidden flare, experts think the sunspot has grown significantly in size since it disappeared from view, Spaceweather.com reported.

When the recent flare erupted, AR3163 was predicted to reemerge onto the near side of the sun within two days based on acoustic images, known as helioseismic echoes, which can detect abnormalities on the hidden surface of the sun. On Jan. 5, the closest edge of AR3163 began to appear on the solar horizon as expected, according to Spaceweather.com. It will soon be pointed directly at Earth and has the capacity to spit out more X-class flares, but the chances of a direct hit are relatively low. 

Earth is currently at perihelion, meaning that our planet is at its closest point to the sun. On Jan. 4, another CME given off by an M-class flare, which was capable of causing minor radio blackouts, bashed into Earth right as the planet moved into its closest possible proximity to the sun. 

Solar activity will continue to ramp up as we approach the peak of the sun's 11-year solar cycle, which will occur in 2025. During December 2022 there were 24 active sunspots on the sun, the highest number for more than seven years, according to Spaceweather.com. 

Editor's Note: Updated at 10:05 a.m. EST on Jan. 6 to clarify that the X-class flare wasn't officially confirmed. But a second confirmed X-class flare was emitted by the same sunspot on Jan. 6, according to Spaceweather.com.

The sun is a great ball of fiery, electrically charged gas. As the sun advances through its regular 11-year solar cycle, electromagnetic activity on the star's surface gets more and more chaotic. This turbulence inevitably leads to the appearance of sunspots — dark, planet-size regions that form in the sun's lower atmosphere as a result of intense magnetic disturbances.

To most visible-light telescopes, sunspots appear black. But why do they look this way, and are they really black?

It turns out that sunspots aren't actually black. Rather, the darkness is just an optical illusion created by the contrasting heat of sunspots and their surroundings.   

"Sunspots are only dark in contrast to the bright face of the sun," according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). "If you could cut an average sunspot out of the Sun and place it elsewhere in the night sky, it would be about as bright as a full moon."

The reason sunspots appear so much darker than the rest of the sun's visible surface, or photosphere, is because they are much cooler, and the gas underneath a sunspot emits about 25% as much light as the rest of the sun, according to NASA. 

Sunspots are still scorching hot — astronomers estimate that the temperature of a typical one is about 6,300 degrees Fahrenheit (3,500 degrees Celsius) — but the surrounding photosphere blazes at roughly 10,000 F (5,500 C), according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

Sunspots are cool because they form in regions where magnetic fields are especially strong — roughly 2,500 times stronger than Earth's, and far stronger than anywhere else on the sun, according to the NWS. This increases the magnetic pressure exerted on sunspots, thereby inhibiting the flow of heat from the sun's interior to the surface and leaving the region cooler than its surroundings.

The pent-up magnetic energy of sunspots can have some spectacular — and dangerous — side effects. When the magnetic-field lines around sunspots become too tangled, they can snap into new configurations, releasing sudden bursts of magnetic energy. This energy can interact with the surrounding plasma — hot, electrically charged gas that makes up much of the sun — and create an explosion of energy known as a solar flare. 

Related: Could a solar storm ever destroy Earth?

Solar flares always occur in active regions near sunspots, which means the more sunspots there are on the sun at a given time, the more likely a flare is to erupt. Sunspots are more likely to occur near the climax of the sun's 11-year activity cycle, also known as the "solar maximum," when magnetic activity peaks.

The heat from a flare can, in turn, trigger another sort of explosion called a coronal mass ejection (CME), in which charged solar particles blast straight out of the sun’s atmosphere and zoom across space at high speeds.

Most CMEs sail harmlessly into space. But if a CME happens to be aimed at Earth, there can be harmful consequences. As a CME passes over Earth’s atmosphere, it can knock out power grids, cause radio blackouts or damage satellites; life on Earth remains protected by our planet's magnetic field, but astronauts working in space may be hit with higher-than-normal doses of radiation.

But there's a bright side: When a CME hits Earth, the resulting rain of charged particles through our planet's atmosphere causes auroras to appear at much lower latitudes than usual. For that beautiful display of color in Earth's sky, you can thank a big, dark dot on the sun.

Originally published on Live Science.

Scientists have captured the first direct evidence of the sun's magnetic field quickly switching directions, which could help explain the mysterious force that flings particles across our solar system.

The researchers observed the phenomenon using the Solar Orbiter probe, which was developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and is jointly run with NASA. The probe, which launched into close orbit around the sun in February 2020, first spotted the abnormality in our star's magnetic field in March this year. Using its Metis coronagraph to block out the glare of the sun's disk and focus on its edges, the probe captured images of a puzzling S-shaped bend in the tendrils of wispy plasma streaming out from the sun's corona, or upper atmosphere.

The scientists say the S-shaped kink is evidence of the sun's magnetic field suddenly reversing — a long-hypothesized process known as a magnetic switchback. Previously, spacecraft such as the Helios 1 and 2 probes and NASA's Parker Solar Probe have detected indirect evidence of switches in the sun's magnetic field, but this is the first time that direct and visible evidence of a switchback has been captured. The researchers published their findings Sept. 12 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

Related: Ancient solar storm smashed Earth at the wrong part of the sun's cycle — and scientists are concerned 

"I would say that this first image of a magnetic switchback in the solar corona has revealed the mystery of their origin," lead author Daniele Telloni, an astrophysicist at the National Institute for Astrophysics’ Astrophysical Observatory of Torino in Italy, said in a statement. 

The Solar Orbiter photographed the kink on March 25, just a day before it performed a close flyby of the sun that brought the probe within Mercury's orbit. After comparing the image with a concurrent one taken of the sun's surface, the scientists realized that the S-shaped kink had appeared above a sunspot. 

Sunspots are cooler, dark patches on the sun where powerful, knotted magnetic fields are created by the flow of the sun's electrically charged plasma. These fields, in turn, can affect plasma in variable ways, depending on if they form open or closed loops. 

Closed magnetic fields emerge from one point on the sun's surface and dive back in at another, forming  huge, looping arcs of electrified gas above the star. When these filaments collapse, they can release bursts of radiation called solar flares and fire explosive jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Open magnetic field lines behave in a different way; they stretch far out into space and link up with the solar system's magnetic field, creating a high-speed interplanetary highway across which particles from the sun (the solar wind) can stream for billions of miles. 

On planets that have strong magnetic fields, like our own, the planet’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere, absorbs the barrage of solar debris from the solar wind, triggering powerful geomagnetic storms. During these storms on Earth, waves of highly energetic particles slightly compress our magnetic field. The particles then trickle down magnetic-field lines near the poles and agitate molecules in the atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light to create colorful auroras, such as the ones that make up the Northern Lights.

The researchers think that switchbacks take place above sunspots where closed field lines break and connect with open ones. Much like cracking a whip, this releases a burst of energy as the S-shaped switchback is sent out into space.

The proof that these switchbacks exist could help scientists to understand how pockets of solar wind are able to accelerate and heat up even when they are far away from the sun.

"This is exactly the kind of result we were hoping for with Solar Orbiter," Daniel Müller, ESA project scientist for Solar Orbiter, said in the statement. "With every orbit, we obtain more data from our suite of ten instruments. Based on results like this one, we will fine-tune the observations planned for Solar Orbiter's next solar encounter to understand the way in which the Sun connects to the wider magnetic environment of the Solar System. This was Solar Orbiter's very first close pass to the Sun, so we expect many more exciting results to come."

Originally published on Live Science.

In 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington saw a blast of white light on the surface of the sun. This was the Carrington Event, as scientists now call it, and it is the largest recorded solar storm ever recorded. It was linked with extraordinary auroras — the Northern and Southern Lights — that were visible in the sky near both the poles and the equator, everywhere from Canada to Australia.The enormous solar outburst also caused electrical disruptions from Paris to Boston. 

While the Carrington Event may seem like history, there are many concerns about what might happen if an event as powerful as — or even more powerful than—  the Carrington Event were to strike Earth today, now that humanity is far more dependent on electricity.

Related: Could a solar storm destroy Earth?

The 1859 Carrington Event

On Thursday, Sept. 2, 1859, at roughly 11:18 a.m. in the town of Redhill outside London, Carrington was investigating a group of dark specks on the sun known as sunspots, when he detected what he later described as "a singular outbreak of light which lasted about five minutes." 

This was the first solar flare ever seen and reported, according to a 2016 study in the journal Advances in Space Research.

Magnetic sensors at the Kew Observatory in London detected extraordinary magnetic disturbances on Earth from Aug. 28 to Sept. 7 that year, especially on Aug. 28 and Sept. 2. These coincided with what may arguably have been the most intense auroras in the past 160 years, the 2016 study noted. 

"Luminous waves rolled up in quick succession as far as the zenith, some a brilliancy sufficient to cast a perceptible shadow on the ground," the Times of London reported on Sept. 6, 1859.

The colorful displays were so bright that people in Missouri could read by the atmospheric light after midnight, according to an 1859 report in the Weekly West newspaper. Gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up and made coffee, bacon and eggs at 1 a.m. local time, thinking the sun had risen on a cloudy morning, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The Northern and Southern Lights usually appear near the planet's poles. However, during the Carrington Event, people witnessed the auroras all the way in the tropics, including in Cuba, Jamaica and Panama, the 2016 study noted. 

Auroras were also seen in the southern hemisphere. For example, in Moreton Bay in Australia, "most of our readers saw last week, for three nights, commencing after sunset and lighting up the heavens with a gorgeous hue of red, the Southern Aurora," according to a report in the Moreton Bay Courier on Sept. 7, 1859, the 2016 study noted.

Meanwhile, telegraph lines experienced "one of the most startling as well as singular electrical phenomena," when "a superabundance of electricity in the air" enabled telegraph machines to send messages from New York to Pittsburgh without the aid of batteries, according to the Washington Star in 1859. 

Sparks flew from telegraph machines in Paris, according to a report in the The Illustrated London News dated Sept. 24, 1859, and telegraph operator Frederick Royce in Washington, D.C. reported receiving "a very severe electric shock, which stunned me for an instant," The New York Times reported on Sept. 5, 1859. "An old man who was sitting facing me, and but a few feet distant, said that he saw a spark of fire jump from my forehead."

All in all, the Carrington Event affected almost half of the telegraphic stations in the United States, according to the 2016 study.

What caused the Carrington Event?

Solar flares, the largest explosive events in the solar system, are intense eruptions of plasma and radiation associated with sunspots, according to NASA. The sun unleashes solar flares when magnetic energy that builds up on our star gets suddenly released, Hugh Hudson, a solar physicist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, wrote in a 2021 study in the journal Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. 

Solar flares are often accompanied by the release of giant bubbles of solar material, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These eruptions may contain billions of tons of plasma — clouds of electrically charged particles — that can race out at millions of miles per hour, NASA noted.

Hudson's 2021 study estimated that the radiation from the Carrington flare likely carried about 4 X 10^32 ergs of energy, which is about as much as 10 billion 1-megaton nuclear bombs. He also estimated that the event's CME likely carried about 3 X 10^32 ergs of kinetic energy.

The Carrington Event triggered a geomagnetic storm on Earth, Hudson noted in his study.

The explosion likely spat out a coronal mass ejection that blasted our planet with high-speed gusts of super-heated plasma clouds, which had intense magnetic fields embedded within them. When such outbursts slam into Earth's magnetosphere — a shell around the planet that holds plasma trapped by Earth's magnetic field — this plasma can flow down the planet's magnetic field lines and smash into molecules in Earth's atmosphere, resulting in auroras.

Solar flares can also trigger intense electrical currents in the magnetosphere, according to NOAA. These currents may in turn generate magnetic disturbances in the ground on Earth, which can produce electrical currents in long stretches of electrically conductive material, such as power lines, telecommunication cables and pipelines. 

Geomagnetic storms have the potential to wreak havoc on Earth. In 1989, a geomagnetic storm blacked out the entire Canadian province of Quebec in 90 seconds, leaving 6 million customers in the dark for nine hours, according to NASA. It also damaged transformers as far away as New Jersey—including one at a nuclear power plant—and nearly took down U.S. power grids from the Eastern Seaboard to the Pacific Northwest.

Geomagnetic storms can also disrupt radio communications and GPS navigation by warping the atmosphere in ways that modify the paths of radio signals, NOAA noted. For instance, the Halloween Storm of 2003 prevented the Federal Aviation Administration from providing GPS navigational guidance for roughly 30 hours, according to a 2011 study for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Solar plasma can also heat the planet's upper atmospheric layers, making them swell and potentially drag down satellites in low Earth orbit, NOAA said. 

What would a Carrington Event do today?

The world has become far more dependent on electricity than it was when the Carrington Event occurred. If a similarly powerful solar flare that was pointed at Earth — as opposed to away from our planet, where it would not have any direct consequences for our world —were to explode now, it might cause unprecedented damage.

For example, a 2013 study from British insurance giant Lloyd's of London estimated that electrical outages from a Carrington-level event might lead to up to $2.6 trillion in lost revenue for the North American power industry alone. The study also found global blackouts up to years long might occur because such an event could simultaneously damage multiple extra-high-voltage transformers that are difficult to replace. This could in turn result in major disruptions to financial markets, banking, telecommunications, business transactions, emergency and hospital services, the pumping of water and fuel and food transport.

Similarly, a 2017 study in the journal Space Weather found that in the most extreme blackout scenario, impacting 66% of the U.S. population, the daily domestic economic loss could total $41.5 billion plus an additional $7 billion loss via international supply chain disruptions. In contrast, if it only affected extreme northern states, which are home to 8% of the U.S. population, the economic loss per day could reach $6.2 billion supplemented by an international supply chain loss of $0.8 billion. (The study calculated using 2011 U.S. dollars.)

However, although the Carrington Event was powerful, "we have seen comparable events since then," Hudson told Live Science in an email. For example, two of the so-called Halloween solar flares of 2003 may have each emitted comparable amounts of radiated energy as the Carrington Event.

As such, Hudson suggested that a solar flare on the level of the Carrington Event might not pose as big a threat to humankind as some fear. Still,  a Carrington Event pointed at Earth today "would have substantial impacts, mainly on human activities in space." Hudson said "We do not have much practice for such an event, because the space assets haven't been exposed to an event of this magnitude yet.” Indeed, Apollo astronauts have made their lunar excursions in the midst of solar activity — “it was on a lesser scale, but still very dangerous to unprotected humans in space," Hudson noted.

In addition, there is evidence that the sun may be capable of "superflares" that can unleash 10 times or more energy than the Carrington Event. For example, in a 2021 study in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists using NASA's now-retired Kepler space telescope found that over the course of four years, 15 sun-like stars released 26 superflares packing a wallop up to 100 times greater than the Carrington Event. A 2020 study in the Astrophysical Journal found similar results during the first year of NASA's ongoing TESS mission.

Moreover, scientists analyzing tree rings detected evidence of radioactive carbon-14 atoms — which each possess two more neutrons in their nuclei than regular carbon atoms — from solar explosions. Spikes of carbon-14 seen in the years 660 B.C., A.D. 774 and A.D. 994 may have come from superflares that were significantly stronger than the Carrington Event, Hudson said.

"The notable thing is that even the Carrington event, or comparably large normal events, are not detectable by the carbon-14 technique," Hudson said in the email. "So these ancient records are ominous."

When will the next Carrington Event occur?

A study published Feb. 29, 2024, in the journal Space Weather looked at digitized copies of magnetic field recordings from 1859 to estimate the strength of the Carrington Event. Based on the readings, the researchers concluded that Carrington-level events likely occur once every 100 to 1000 years. However, without knowing exactly how powerful the event was, scientists can only make educated guesses about how common solar outbursts of its kind may be.

The 2021 Astrophysical Journal study analyzing Kepler data suggested that superflares about 10 times more energetic than the Carrington Event may happen about every 3,000 years, and ones about 100 times more energetic may occur about every 6,000 years. Still, the rates at which our sun in particular may release Carrington-like or more powerful flares "are not well understood," Hudson said. 

When it comes to solar explosions that can release major spikes of carbon-14 atoms seen in tree rings, scientists now know of at least a half-dozen "scattered through the Holocene, a 10,000-year time scale," he noted. However, "we do not understand how these are related to normal solar eruptive events such as Carrington's, and until we do, all bets are off, I'm afraid."

Editor's note: This article was updated on March 26, 2024, to include new information about the Carrington Event's strength and the likeliness of similar events occurring again.

All life on Earth owes its existence to the sun's radiant heat. But what happens when that radiation surges out of control, and billions of tons of charged solar material suddenly barrel our way at thousands of miles a second? What happens when Earth takes a direct hit from a solar flare — and could a strong enough one ever destroy life on our planet as we know it?

The answers are complicated, but most scientists agree on one thing: Earth's magnetic field and insulating atmosphere keep us extremely well protected from even the most powerful solar outbursts. While solar storms can tamper with radar and radio systems or knock satellites offline, the most harmful radiation is sopped up in the sky long before it touches human skin.

"We live on a planet with a very thick atmosphere… that stops all of the harmful radiation that is produced in a solar flare," said Alex Young, Associate Director for Science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Even in the largest events that we've seen in the past 10,000 years, we see that the effect is not enough to damage the atmosphere such that we are no longer protected," Young said in a 2011 video addressing fears that a solar flare would end the world in 2012. 

Still, not all solar flares are harmless. While Earth’s magnetic field prevents widespread death from solar radiation, the sheer electromagnetic power of a flare could disrupt power grids, internet connections and other communication devices on Earth, resulting in chaos and potentially even death. Space weather experts at NASA and other agencies take this threat seriously, and closely monitor the sun for potentially hazardous activity.

What are solar flares?

Solar flares occur when the sun's magnetic field lines become taut and twisted, causing enormous, planet-sized storms of electromagnetic energy to form on the sun's surface. We can see these storms as cold, dark splotches known as sunspots. Around sunspots, huge tendrils of magnetic field lines twist, spool and sometimes snap, creating powerful flashes of energy, or solar flares.

Most energy from a solar flare is radiated away as ultraviolet and X-ray light, Live Science previously reported. However, the intense energy of a flare can also heat up nearby gas in the sun's atmosphere, launching enormous blobs of charged particles known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) out into space. If a flaring sunspot happens to be facing Earth, then any resulting CMEs blast right toward us, typically reaching our planet in anywhere from 15 hours to several days.

Whether or not you've heard of CMEs, you've likely lived through hundreds of them; the sun emits anywhere from one CME each week to several a day, depending on where we are in the sun's 11-year cycle of activity, according to NASA. Most CMEs pass over our planet completely undetected by the general public, thanks to Earth's powerful magnetic field, or magnetosphere.

However, the biggest, most energetic CMEs can actually compress our planet's magnetic field as they pass, resulting in what's known as a geomagnetic storm.

As electromagnetic energy from the sun pours into our magnetosphere, atoms and molecules in Earth's atmosphere become electrically charged, creating effects that can be seen around the world. During such storms, the aurora borealis, typically only seen near the North Pole, can shift down so far that it becomes visible near the equator. 

Radio and radar systems around the world can black out, and electrical grids may become overloaded and lose power. Some experts fear that a sufficiently large CME could create an "internet apocalypse" by overloading undersea internet cables and leaving parts of the world without web access for weeks or months, though this has not happened yet. Satellites and space stations, which orbit beyond the protection of Earth's atmosphere, can also be debilitated by the renegade radiation of CMEs.

Still, even the most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history — the 1859 Carrington Event — had no noticeable impact on the health of humans or other life on Earth. If even stronger solar storms battered our planet before this, there is no evidence that they impacted human health either.

"No matter what, flares do not have a significant effect on us here on Earth," Doug Biesecker, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, told the Stanford Solar Center. "What sort of fluxes would have to strike the Earth to wipe us out? I don't know the answer to that, but obviously, we've never even observed a solar event big enough to have any measurable effects on human health."

Star damage

Our nearest star may not pose an extinction threat – but scientists suspect that other nearby stars could. When certain stars run out of fuel and die, they explode in a tremendous supernova that blasts powerful radiation into space for millions of light-years around. These blasts are many, many times more powerful that solar flares; should such an explosion occur sufficiently close to Earth, the dying star could bathe our planet in so much ultraviolet radiation that it strips our protective ozone layer away, making Earth vulnerable to a barrage of charged interstellar particles. 

The authors of a recent study (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Aug. 2020) suspect that the death of a star within 65 light-years of Earth may have done just that about 359 million years ago, at the end of the Devonian Period (416 million to 358 million years ago). A mass extinction at the end of this period resulted in the death of 70% of Earth’s invertebrates, though scientists are not certain what triggered it. However, an examination of fossil spores from the time of the extinction revealed signs of ultraviolet light damage – suggesting that perhaps an exploding star triggered the extinction. 

Fortunately, there are no supernova candidates close enough to Earth to pose such a threat anytime soon, the study authors reassured. We have only our warm little sun to worry about – and our atmosphere makes sure that we stay on that star’s friendly side.

Originally published on Live Science.

Scientists have detected a rapidly growing sunspot that’s pointed directly at Earth and could launch an assault of solar energy our way in the coming days.

The sunspot, named AR3085 for the "active region" of the sun in which it appeared, was barely a blip several days ago. Now, it has grown 10 times bigger, morphing into a pair of sunspots that each measure nearly the diameter of Earth, according to SpaceWeather.com. This short gif shows the spot's evolution over about two days.

A number of solar flares — large explosions of electromagnetic radiation that snap off from the sun's surface and launch outward into space— have been detected "crackling" around the spot, according to SpaceWeather.  Fortunately, they are all currently C-class flares, which fit into the weakest of the three tiers of solar flares that government satellites track. A-, B- and C-class flares are generally too weak to have a noticeable impact on Earth. M-class flares are stronger, capable of causing radio blackouts at high latitudes, while X-class flares are the strongest and can cause widespread radio blackouts, damage satellites and knock out ground-based power grids, according to NASA.

If the spots continue to grow over the coming days, they could produce stronger flares that could barrel toward Earth, potentially endangering satellites and communication systems. For now, however, there is no imminent danger.

Sunspots are large, dark regions of strong magnetic fields that form on the sun's surface. These regions — which typically measure as wide as planets — appear darker because they are cooler than their surroundings, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. They form where bands of the sun's magnetic field become tangled and taut, inhibiting the flow of hot gas from the sun's interior and forming cooler, darker regions on the sun's surface.

These pile-ups of magnetic energy often lead to solar flares. The more sunspots that appear on the sun at a given time, the more likely solar flares are to erupt.

The prevalence of both sunspots and solar flares are linked to the sun's 11-year cycle of activity, which transitions between periods of high and low sunspot density every decade or so. The next solar maximum — or the period of highest sunspot activity — is predicted to hit in 2025, with as many as 115 sunspots likely to appear on the sun's surface during its days of peak activity.

Solar activity has been ramping up over the last few years, with numerous X-class flares swooping over our planet since spring 2022 — sometimes within days of one another. The number of sunspots and solar flares will likely increase as time ticks toward the next solar maximum.

Originally published on Live Science.

Space: the final frontier. The region between our home planet and everything else in the universe is a big unknown — full of untold wonders, celestial objects so big they boggle the mind, and some truly catastrophic events. Here are seven of the most terrifying things in space.

1. Incoming megacomet

Are you ready for a "megacomet"? The appearance in our solar system in 2021 of the biggest-ever comet is terrifying. At 85 miles (137 kilometers) across, with an icy nucleus 50 times bigger than the previous record holder and a mass 100,000 times greater than the average comet's, comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is so big, it was initially classified as a minor planet. 

Thankfully, this monster snowball is predicted to get no closer than a billion miles (1.6 billion km) to Earth when it makes its closest approach in 2031. But could there be more monster comets out there? That is a truly terrifying prospect.

2. Collision with Andromeda

It may be 2.5 million light-years from Earth, but Andromeda, the largest galaxy in our Local Group, is on a terrifying trajectory: It's headed straight for, and will one day collide with, our Milky Way galaxy. Just before it does, though, it will dominate the night sky. Thankfully, Andromeda won't arrive for another 3 billion to 5 billion years or so. 

Related: Who will survive the cosmic crash between our galaxy and its neighbor?

3. Catastrophic solar flare

Earth is constantly bombarded by high-energy particles from the sun. Most of the time, the planet's magnetic field deflects these solar attacks. However, occasionally, magnetic contortions inside our star realign and cause a solar flare, a sudden flash of light that hurls incredible amounts of X-rays and energy in all directions that travels at the speed of light. The result can be blackouts in navigation and communications signals. Another scenario is a coronal mass ejection (CME), a slow-burner that sends magnetized particles into space. If the CME is aimed at Earth we get geomagnetic storms a few days later, which have the potential to disrupt communications and power grids. 

The most powerful geomagnetic storm in modern history, known as the Carrington Event, occurred in 1859, before the modern age of technology. If a Carrington-magnitude storm were to occur now, it would cause an "internet apocalypse" — an outage that could last months, Live Science previously reported. The chance of such a huge solar storm was rated at between 1.6% and 12% per decade.

4. Rogue black holes in our galaxy

Black holes are obviously terrifying: These crushed remnants of a massive star that exploded as a supernova are so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape its grasp. Thankfully, it feels pretty safe to look at the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. After all, it's 26,000 light-years away. 

But not all of the black holes in the Milky Way are as distant as the monster one at the center of our galaxy; there are thought to be 100 million black holes in the Milky Way, a large fraction of which may be wandering through the Milky Way. This year, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a rogue black hole in our galaxy — this one only 5,000 light-years from Earth — and even measured its mass: seven times the mass of the sun.

5. A supernova in the "kill zone"

Another terror from space is the potential for a catastrophic supernova. If a star dies in a massive explosion called a supernova, anything within a specific "kill zone" will be wiped out by intense waves of radiation. Astronomers have calculated that the kill zone extends 40 or 50 light-years from a supernova's blast, and no known stars within that proximity to Earth are likely to blow anytime soon. However, it's possible that high-energy X-rays and gamma-rays from more distant supernovas could interact with Earth's atmosphere and damage the ozone layer, which would make it easier for dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the sun to get through. 

A close supernova is unlikely; although one of the most famous red giant stars, Betelgeuse, is on the cusp of going supernova, it's nearly 650 light-years distant, meaning it is unlikely to affect our solar system. The closest supernova to Earth directly observed by astronomers in the past 400 years was 1987A (SN 1987A). Discovered in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, it blazed with the power of 100 million stars for many months following its discovery on Feb. 23, 1987.

6. 154,741 extra asteroids

Many large objects lurk in our solar system, and we know only about a fraction of them. It's possible that there's an unknown asteroid out there that could destroy life on Earth, just like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Luckily, we're discovering more of our solar system's space rocks every day, thanks to ever-improving wide-field telescope surveys. In fact, scientists now think that 90% of "planet-killer" near-Earth objects — those larger than 0.6 mile (1 km) in diameter — and around 50% of "city-killer" have been found. 

However, the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope revealed this year that there are about 10 times more asteroids in the solar system than astronomers thought. The new data set includes more than 150,000 objects in the solar system, most of them asteroids. Gulp.

7. The moon's shadow

A total solar eclipse is a spellbinding celestial event, but totality can also be a little terrifying. By the time the moon covers 95% of the sun's disk, the sky gets darker. The temperature drops. A chilly wind blows over you, and every hair on your body stands up. Eerie gray twilight descends, and shadows sharpen. If you're in an elevated location overlooking a vast landscape, you can also see the moon's shadow racing toward you until it swallows you — and everything goes dark. There's an aching fear in your stomach; maybe the sun will not return. 

A naked-eye view of the sun's corona is the prize for anyone standing in the moon's shadow, but that haunting feeling will stay with you until daylight returns a few minutes later — and maybe beyond.

Originally published on Live Science.

A huge sunspot on the far side of the sun is set to face Earth this weekend, potentially lashing our planet with a geomagnetic storm. 

The spot is so big it's changing the way the sun vibrates, according to spaceweather.com. If the dark spot hurls a blob of plasma at Earth, it could disrupt our magnetic field, affecting GPS and communication satellites orbiting close to Earth as well as airplane navigation systems. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center issued a forecast for an unsettled geomagnetic field around Earth on Aug. 6 and 7, which could means auroras, though whether it becomes a full-blown solar storm is not yet clear.

Sunspots are dark patches on the surface of the sun that are caused by intense magnetic fields. While this sunspot is on the far side of the sun, scientists detected it by monitoring its effects on the sun’s vibrations.

"The Sun continually vibrates because of convection bubbles hitting the surface,"Dean Pesnell, project scientist of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), told Live Science in an email. Hot and cool bubbles that continually rise and fall inside the sun move energy around, causing vibration that can be detected by solar observatories like the SDO. The sunspot's strong magnetic field slows these vibrations, which travel through the sun. As a result, observatories like the SDO can monitor sunspots on our host star's far side by the delay in these vibrational waves, despite only being able to see its near side, Pesnell added. 

"The larger the sunspot and the stronger the magnetic field the larger this delay will be," Pesnell said. 

The telltale vibrational changes showed up in a helioseismic map near the sun's southeastern limb.

This weekend the sunspot will turn to face Earth, which could potentially lead to solar flares — an intense burst of radiation in the sun's atmosphere. 

"We will probably see flares when the sunspot rotates into view," Pesnell said. 

This solar activity could impact Earth. Solar flares can heat clouds of electrically charged particles from the sun's upper atmosphere to enormous temperatures, which can launch gigantic blobs of plasma at Earth known as, coronal mass ejections (CMEs). "There is a filament heading in the direction of the sunspot and so there might be some coronal mass ejections," Pesnell added.

"Solar flares and CMEs are the major way solar activity affects the Earth," said Pesnell. "From my work, higher levels of solar activity mean increased drag on satellites orbiting close to the Earth — and satellite operators will lose income if that drag de-orbits a working satellite." Other possible effects of more severe "space weather" include the disruption of communications and navigation in the polar regions — often used by intercontinental plane flights — and even power outages on Earth. 

The sun has an 11 year cycle during which its activity waxes and wanes, with a distinct "solar maximum" and "solar minimum" when the number of sunspots are most and least numerous, respectively. The sun is now headed for a solar maximum in 2024 or 2025. Lately, the sun has been more active than NASA predicted. CMEs are normal behavior for sunspots at this point of the sunspot cycle, Pesnell said. 

Originally published on Live Science.

A gigantic sunspot has swelled to twice Earth's size, doubling its diameter in 24 hours, and it's pointed right at us. 

The sunspot, called AR3038, grew to 2.5 times Earth's size — making the sunspot roughly 19,800 miles, or 31,900 kilometers, in diameter — from Sunday (June 19) to Monday night (June 20), according to Spaceweather.com, a website that tracks news about solar flares, geomagnetic storms and other cosmic weather events. 

Sunspots are dark patches on the sun's surface where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electric charges from the sun's plasma, knot before suddenly snapping. The resulting release of energy launches bursts of radiation called solar flares and generates explosive jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). 

Related: Strange new type of solar wave defies physics

"Yesterday, sunspot AR3038 was big. Today, it's enormous. The fast-growing sunspot has doubled in size in only 24 hours," Spaceweather.com reported. "AR3038 has an unstable 'beta-gamma' magnetic field that harbors energy for M-class [medium-sized] solar flares, and it is directly facing Earth."

When a solar flare hits Earth's upper atmosphere, the flare's X-rays and ultraviolet radiation ionize atoms, making it impossible to bounce high-frequency radio waves off them and creating a so-called radio blackout. Radio blackouts occur over the areas on Earth that are lit by the sun while a flare is underway; such blackouts are classified from R1 to R5 according to ascending severity. 

In April and May, two solar flares caused R3 blackouts over the Atlantic Ocean, Australia and Asia, Live Science previously reported. As solar flares travel at the speed of light, they take only 8 minutes to reach us, from an average distance of about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). 

If an Earth-facing sunspot forms near the sun's equator (where AR3038 is located), it typically takes just under two weeks for it to travel across the sun so that it is no longer facing Earth, according to SpaceWeatherLive. Currently, AR3038 lies slightly to the north of the sun's equator and is just over halfway across, so Earth will remain in its crosshairs for a few more days. 

Despite its alarmingly speedy growth, the giant sunspot is less scary than it may seem. The flares it will most likely produce are M-class solar flares, which "generally cause brief radio blackouts that affect Earth's polar regions," alongside minor radiation storms, the European Space Agency wrote in a blog post. M-class flares are the most common type of solar flare. Although the sun does occasionally release enormous X-class flares (the strongest category) with the potential to cause high-frequency blackouts on the side of Earth that's exposed to the flare, these flares are observed much less often than smaller solar eruptions.

Sunspots can also belch solar material. On planets that have strong magnetic fields, like Earth, the barrage of solar debris from CMEs is absorbed by our magnetic field, triggering powerful geomagnetic storms. During these storms, Earth's magnetic field gets compressed slightly by the waves of highly energetic particles, which trickle down magnetic-field lines near the poles and agitate molecules in the atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light to create colorful auroras in the night sky.

The movements of these electrically charged particles can disrupt our planet's magnetic field powerfully enough to send satellites tumbling to Earth, Live Science previously reported, and scientists have warned that extreme geomagnetic storms could even cripple the internet. Erupting debris from CMEs usually takes around 15 to 18 hours to reach Earth, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center.

Astronomers have known since 1775 that solar activity rises and falls according to a roughly 11-year cycle, but recently, the sun has been more active than expected, with nearly double the sunspot appearances predicted by NOAA. The sun's activity is projected to steadily climb for the next few years, reaching an overall maximum in 2025 before decreasing again.

Scientists think the largest solar storm ever witnessed during contemporary history was the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles fried telegraph systems all over the world and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean. If a similar event were to happen today, scientists warn, it would cause trillions of dollars in damage and trigger widespread blackouts, much like the 1989 solar storm that released a billion-ton plume of gas and caused a blackout across the entire Canadian province of Quebec, NASA reported.

Originally published on Live Science.