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.

Earth may survive the fiery death of the sun, even as our star engulfs the innermost planets, a new study using state-of-the-art models suggests.

The findings offer a potential alternative fate for our planet, which was thought to face certain death as the sun engulfs it in a thermonuclear inferno billions of years from now. As a yellow dwarf star, the sun is expected to have a relatively calm, 10 billion-year life. But in about 5 billion years, it will run out of hydrogen to fuse in its core and begin fusing hydrogen in its shell, causing it to expand enormously into a red giant star and then an even larger "AGB star," before it ultimately dies as a white dwarf.

Now, in a Letter to the Editor published June 19 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomers used stellar evolution models and observed a nearby dying star to reassess Earth's ultimate, potentially fiery fate.

Solar tug of war

When the sun enters its later life stages, Earth will be at the mercy of two competing forces — a fate shared by countless worlds throughout the unimaginably immense span of cosmic time.

As the sun expands to potentially hundreds of times its current size, the increased tidal forces will pull Earth toward our rapidly ballooning, sputtering star. Yet the surging sun will also lose its puffed-up outer layers into space through stellar wind. As it sheds much of its mass and becomes lighter, its gravitational grip will weaken, allowing our planet to escape outward into the depths of the solar system, the models show.

"The fate of Earth depends on a delicate balance between these two effects," Mats Esseldeurs, a doctoral candidate at KU Leuven's Institute of Astronomy in Belgium and first author of the study, said in a statement. "If tidal interactions dominate, Earth is engulfed. If mass loss dominates, Earth escapes to a wider orbit."

Previous research only muddies the issue. Studies have made different assumptions about solar mass loss, tidal forces and planetary interactions that may occur as the inner solar system evolves. As a result, it's uncertain if Earth will survive both of the sun's giant phases before our star shrivels into a tiny-but-dense stellar corpse called a white dwarf.

In a glimmer of hope, astronomers have discovered intact worlds around white dwarfs. On the other hand, some white dwarf systems are littered with the rocky remnants of their destroyed planetary children. So the researchers observed the formerly sunlike, dying giant star L2 Puppis, located 200 light-years away in the "poop deck" constellation Puppis, to glimpse our solar future. L2 Puppis may be losing up to one-millionth of a solar mass per year, according to previous estimates, expelling a dusty disk that's thought to harbor a planet 12 to 16 times the mass of Jupiter.

Additionally, the researchers performed state-of-the-art gravitational calculations "based on the internal structure and dynamics of evolved stars," modeling the orbital evolution of the inner solar system and the sun's lifespan from its infancy to its final phase as a "burned out" white dwarf.

So long, Mercury and Venus

Based on observations of L2 Puppis' mass loss, combined with the updated stellar evolution models, the researchers projected that Earth will survive as it shifts to just outside the expanding sun's radius.

"The largest uncertainty no longer comes from the tidal calculations, but from how much mass the future sun will lose," Esseldeurs said in the statement. "Observations of sun-like giant stars currently point towards Earth's survival, but we need better observations before we can be certain."

But even if Earth survives, our solar system siblings will not be spared; the simulations suggest Mercury and Venus will be engulfed by the hellish blaze of our dying star.

Additional stellar observations and improved models will help elucidate our planet's fate. For example, the European Space Agency's PLATO mission, a space telescope that aims to search for Earth-like planets around sunlike stars, will launch next year. It will likely detect planets around aging stars, thus providing a more accurate account of this potentially doomed population.

See how much you know about the sun with our sun quiz!

A "cannibal" coronal mass ejection (CME) birthed from a rare type of sunspot will slam into Earth tonight (June 4), likely bringing auroras to skies above 23 U.S. states.

The solar outburst began on June 2 from sunspot 4455, a dark patch on the sun's surface where powerful magnetic fields became knotted and unstable. These field lines then snapped, producing a series of X-class solar flares — the most powerful class of solar eruption — alongside multiple CMEs.

CMEs are large, fast-moving clouds of magnetized plasma and solar radiation that occasionally get flung into space alongside solar flares. 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 much farther away from Earth's magnetic poles than usual.

One of the CMEs thrown out by yesterday's eruption caught up with and engulfed a slower one, creating a combined, cannibal eruption, according to a model from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The cannibal CME is expected to arrive mid-afternoon EDT and will create a strong (G3) or possibly even severe (G4) geomagnetic storm, according to NOAA.

Auroras resulting from this class of geomagnetic storm are often visible from 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.

And this may not be the last eruption we see from sunspot 4455. It is a rare "anti-Hale" sunspot, meaning its magnetic polarity is reversed compared with the other sunspots in its hemisphere. This type of polarity, seen in fewer than 10% of sunspots, makes the sunspot highly unstable and more likely to spit out powerful solar 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 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, anti-Hale 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.

Skywatchers are in for a treat this week as the northern lights are predicted to grace skies across several northern U.S. states ‪—‬ and it's all thanks to a large hole that has opened up in the sun's atmosphere.

Auroras may be visible as far south as Idaho and New York Friday night (April 17) and early Saturday morning (April 18), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center shared in a Facebook post.

Also known as the aurora borealis, the northern lights are an atmospheric phenomenon caused by the knotting of magnetic-field lines on the surface of the sun. When these lines snap, they send huge clouds of electrically-charged particles, called solar wind, into space. Some of these particles eventually reach Earth, the Royal Observatory Greenwich explains.

Most of the particles are deflected by the geomagnetic shield that surrounds our planet. However, some get swept into Earth's magnetic field before traveling down toward the North and South poles.

Once there, the particles collide with atoms and molecules in the atmosphere, causing them to heat up and fluoresce to create the colorful light displays we know as the northern lights.

This week, a large hole appeared in the sun's corona, the outermost part of its atmosphere. "Coronal holes" such as this are regions where the sun's magnetic fields open up, enabling fast-moving solar wind to escape into space, according to Spaceweather.com.

The resulting high-speed winds also may interact with slower solar winds ahead of them, causing these clouds of charged particles to pile up. This creates a shock zone called a corotating interaction region (CIR) that can have a more dramatic impact on the particles in Earth's atmosphere.

This week's high-speed solar winds and the accompanying CIR are expected to reach Earth on April 17 and 18, after which they will likely cause a temporary disturbance in the planet's magnetic field, known as a geomagnetic storm, according to NOAA's three-day forecast released April 16. Moderate (G2) storm conditions are expected from 5 p.m. EDT (9 p.m. GMT) Friday until roughly 2 a.m. EDT (6 a.m. GMT) Saturday and could trigger minor to moderate radio blackouts and strong auroras.

Auroras resulting from this class of geomagnetic storm are often visible from Alaska, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North and South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin, according to NOAA. Skywatchers in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Wyoming also have a chance of seeing one of nature's best light shows.

A new moon Friday will also allow for better viewing conditions amid darker skies.

If you're on the hunt for auroras, make sure to check NOAA's n aurora dashboard for live updates, as space weather forecasts are subject to change.

This month could be the best time to spot the northern lights for nearly a decade, as the combination of the "equinox effect" and supercharged solar activity will make auroras more likely. However, precisely where and when they will appear is still up in the air.

At 10:46 a.m. EDT (14:46 UTC) on Friday, March 20, the sun will cross the celestial equator, marking the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and the fall equinox in the Southern Hemisphere.

As that happens, Earth's axis will be side-on to the sun. It will mean shorter nights in the Northern Hemisphere until the summer solstice in June, but for a few weeks before and after the equinox, it also means the northern lights will be more likely.

The equinox effect

This "equinox effect," which doubles the chance of auroral activity around the spring and fall equinoxes, was first explained by scientists Christopher Russell and Robert McPherron in a 1973 paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

They argued that auroras were more likely in March and September because the south-pointing magnetic fields in the solar wind cancel out Earth's north-pointing magnetic field, making it easier for the solar wind to stream along magnetic-field lines. Effectively, the door swings open, which allows in more of the charged particles that collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere to cause auroras.

March's equinox comes as solar maximum — the peak of the sun's 11-year solar activity cycle — is drawing to a close. During solar maximum, the sun's magnetism is at full power. NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the International Solar Cycle Prediction Panel reported that the sun had likely reached solar maximum in October 2024, but they added that it would not be possible to confirm that for months or years.

The sun's magnetic intensity is calculated by counting sunspots — cooler regions on the sun caused by a concentration of magnetic-field lines — on its surface. The number of sunspots is now trending downward, with the U.K. Met Office stating in January that activity appears to be declining. That means fewer solar flares and, crucially, fewer coronal mass ejections — clouds of charged particles that can travel toward Earth to produce auroras.

According to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, Solar Cycle 26 is expected to begin sometime between January 2029 and December 2032, with solar activity likely to remain low during that time.

Will there be a noticeable equinox effect this March? The conditions could produce the best auroras until the mid-2030s, but that doesn't mean we should expect to see them at more southerly latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere.

In the end, everything depends on solar activity, and that's hard to predict in advance. While early February produced the single most active sunspot of the current solar cycle — resulting in auroras at much lower latitudes than usual — that monster spot has since vanished. Unfortunately, there's no way to know whether a new one will emerge to take its place in time for the equinox.

After nearly four years of being covered in dark blotches like an acne-covered teenager, the sun's face has suddenly turned smooth for consecutive days, hinting that solar activity is on the decline. But while this surprising "spotless" spectacle is a sign of things to come, it's still too soon to let our guard down, experts warn.

On Sunday (Feb. 22), there were zero visible sunspots on the Earth-facing side of the sun for the first time since June 8, 2022, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. This "spotless day" ended a 1,335-day-streak of consecutive sunspot sightings, throughout which there has been a constant and looming threat that one of these dark patches may shoot out a potentially dangerous solar storm that could later hit Earth.

This unexpected development continued throughout Monday (Feb. 23) and Tuesday (Feb. 24), which were also spotless, according to Spaceweather.com. But on Wednesday (Feb. 25), a pair of sunspots from the sun's far side rotated into view across our home star's eastern limb, reestablishing the perpetual threat of an incoming solar storm.

The blemish-free solar disk was surprising given that we have only recently emerged from solar maximum — the peak in the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle, when sunspots litter the solar surface and constantly spit out solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

In recent weeks, we have also been hit by a major solar radiation event and witnessed one of the most explosive sunspots of the current solar cycle, which makes the sudden turn of events even more confusing.

But don't let the sun's facade fool you, because the current cycle (Solar Cycle 25) is far from over and we are almost guaranteed to see some more space weather events before our home star transitions to a more permanent state of spotlessness.

"Solar Cycle 25 still has years of life left in it," Spaceweather.com representatives wrote. "However, these spotless days tell us that the current cycle is waning," they added.

Counting sunspots

Sunspots appear when the sun's magnetic field is unstable, which happens in and around solar maximum, when the solar magnetic field completely flips . This makes the dark patches a key indicator of solar cycle progression.

The sudden and sharp rise of sunspots in early 2022 was the first clue that solar maximum would arrive sooner than official forecasts initially suggested, which turned out to be the case. The peak of Solar Cycle 25 (SC25) has also been much more active than expected, with the average number of sunspots climbing to 215.5 in August 2024 — the highest monthly total in more than 23 years.

Over the last few years we have also seen a record number of X-class flares explode from sunspots (partially due to an advance in solar observation technology), and been hit by several major solar storms, including the famous Mothers' Day storm of 2024, which briefly disrupted GPS technology and triggered some of the most widespread auroras in centuries.

Solar maximum likely ended sometime in early 2025 and, despite recent surges in solar activity, the sun is starting to quiet down. For example, there was an average of 112.6 sunspots in January, which is almost half of 2024's peak, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center. But even accounting for this downward trend, it is still very surprising to see consecutive spotless days so soon in the current cycle.

Normally, we'd have to wait for the sun's weakest phase, dubbed solar minimum, to see consecutive spotless days. For example, there were more than 700 spotless days between 2018 and 2020, around the last solar minimum, according to Spaceweather.com.

More to come

Several experts, including Scott McIntosh — the VP of space operations at Lynker Space and former deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, who was one of the first solar physicists to accurately forecast SC25 — have previously told Live Science that solar activity can remain unusually high in the years following solar maximum.

Recent research by Lynker Space has also revealed that the years after solar maximum, dubbed the "battle zone," can be even more chaotic than a cycle's peak, due to instability between different parts of the sun's newly flipped magnetic field: "The potential for large, dangerous geomagnetic storms in the next few years is very real," McIntosh told Live Science in December 2024.

The magnetic configuration of sunspots is more important than their size or frequency when determining how risky they are, meaning that the next big storm could theoretically come from almost any of them, according to The Planetary Society.

The worst-case-scenario is that we are hit by a superstorm on par with the Carrington Event of 1859 — the most extreme space weather event in recorded history, which erupted during a solar cycle similar to SC25. Such a storm has the capacity to wipe out almost every satellite orbiting Earth and cause significant damage to the energy infrastructure on our planet's surface.

A recent study, published in October 2025, estimated that there is roughly a 5% chance that such an event could occur in the next decade. We have also already seen several Carrignton-size sunspots during the current cycle, although none of them have been as active.

All this goes to show that, just like a good book, we shouldn't judge the sun purely by its cover.

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

While the new moon this Tuesday (Feb. 17) will pass without much fanfare in most of the world, something more exciting will be taking place over a sliver of Antarctica: a "ring of fire" solar eclipse, also known as an annular solar eclipse.

During an annular solar eclipse, the moon passes directly in front of the sun but appears too small in the sky to cover it completely. That’s because the moon is at its farthest point from Earth in its slightly elliptical orbit during these rare eclipses. On Feb. 17, 96% of the sun will be covered during the "ring of fire."

Observers within a narrow 383-mile-wide (616 kilometers) path will see a "ring of fire" — the glowing edge of the sun around the dark silhouette of the moon — for up to 2 minutes, 20 seconds.

However, few people will witness it. This eclipse is as remote as they come, with the eclipse's path passing over largely uninhabited terrain in the Antarctic interior.

"It's possible that only a few people will view this eclipse from within the annular zone," eclipse meteorologist Jay Anderson wrote on his website, Eclipsophile. "It's a challenge to reach, and there are only two inhabited locations within the annular shadow, neither of which is set up to welcome tourists. "At worst, a few dozen Russian researchers at Mirny and a small number of French/Italian inhabitants at Concordia [two research stations in Antarctica] will record the event for posterity."

An eclipse for scientists (and penguins)

At Mirny Station, on the Davis Sea coast, the "ring of fire" phase, called annularity, will last 1 minute, 52 seconds, according to Time and Date. Meanwhile, Concordia Station, which is jointly operated by France and Italy, will see the ring of fire for 2 minutes, 9 seconds. The latter location has a much better chance of clear skies, Time and Date adds.

The eclipse officially starts at 09:56 UTC (4:46 a.m. EST), when a partial eclipse will begin across Antarctica and parts of southeastern Africa. (Mozambique, Madagascar and Mauritius will see a 10% to 35% partial eclipse.) The annular phase takes place between 11:42 UTC and 12:41 UTC (6:42 to 7:42 a.m. EST), with the partial phases concluding by 14:27 UTC (2:27 p.m. EST).

Eclipses always come in pairs. With the alignment between the sun, the new moon and Earth precise enough to cause an annular solar eclipse on Feb. 17, a lunar eclipse is inevitable during the next new moon. On March 3, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, parts of the Pacific Ocean and western North America.

The next annular solar eclipse will occur on Feb. 6, 2027, when a "ring of fire" will be visible for up to 7 minutes, 51 seconds from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria, according to Time and Date.

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.

Many objects in space rotate. Earth completes a spin in roughly 24 hours, while Venus takes a whopping 243 Earth days. The moon's rotational period is about 27 days. The sun, it turns out, also rotates. So how long does the sun take to complete a rotation?

The answer depends on your vantage point in space and the part of the sun you are measuring.

In 1612, Galileo Galilei looked at the sun through a telescope, drew what he saw, and observed that sunspots — dark areas near the sun's surface — moved across the solar surface over time. "Galileo tracked a bunch of [sunspots] and came to the conclusion that the sun was rotating," J. Todd Hoeksema, a solar physicist at Stanford University, told Live Science. By determining how fast the sunspots moved across the sun, Galileo found that the sun rotated once every 28 days. But this number doesn't tell the whole story of how fast the sun rotates.

Centuries later, in the mid-1800s, English astronomer Richard Carrington also measured the sun's rotation rate using essentially the same methods as Galileo but with a better telescope, Hoeksema said. Carrington determined how fast the sunspots were rotating in a particular region — approximately 30 degrees latitude (on the sun) — where sunspots were most often observed. According to Carrington's measurements, sunspots moved at a rate that would take them about 27.3 days to travel all the way around the sun.

Most sunspots come and go within a week or two, so they do not last a full rotation, Hoeksema said. Even so, astronomers like Galileo and Carrington could map sunspot movement over days to determine how fast the sun was rotating and, from there, how long it would take the sun to make a full rotation, Hoeksema explained.

However, Earth's rotation throws a wrench into these calculations. Because Earth is traveling around the sun and in the same direction the sun is rotating, a measurement of solar rotation taken from Earth captures the sun's rotation rate relative to the movement of the Earth. This type of measurement is called a synodic rotation rate and is longer by nearly two days than a measurement that's relative to movement of the stars (called a sidereal rotation rate), said Nicholeen Viall, a research astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Carrington's rate of 27.3 days includes that extra two days, Viall said.

So, the sun actually makes more than one full rotation in Carrington's rotation period of 27.3 days, Viall said. Despite this, Carrington's rotation rate was "ultimately adopted as the standard by everyone," Hoeksema said.

However, scientists now know that relative to the movement of the stars, which is so slow as to be negligible in this context, Viall said, the sun would take about 25.4 days to rotate on its axis at the solar latitude where Carrington was observing sunspots.

"From a pure physics perspective, the sidereal rate is the correct rotation rate," Viall said. For that reason, this article will use sidereal rotation rates going forward.

Latitude and depth

Researchers like Carrington had to rely on the sun's visible features, like sunspots, to determine the sun's rotation rate. The problem is that not all regions of the sun have sunspots, Hoeksema said. There are "essentially no sunspots" at the poles and "relatively few" at the equator, he noted, so researchers who rely on sunspots to measure the sun's rotation rate are limited by where on the sun they can take the measurement.

Taking measurements at different locations on the sun is necessary to get the full picture, because the sun's rotation rate depends on latitude (on the sun) and depth, according to Hoeksema.

"It's interesting that there is no one rotation rate that describes the sun," he said. "Each part seems to have its own rate." This phenomenon, called differential rotation, is possible on the sun because it is made of gas. Earth, on the other hand, does not rotate differentially because it is solid; all of its parts must move together.

Starting in the 1970s, scientists began observing solar rotation using methods other than visual observations. One of these is helioseismology, "which is using sound waves that are moving inside the sun to determine its characteristics," Hoeksema said.

Scientists can also measure the sun's rotation by observing Doppler shifts, whereby light waves get shorter or longer depending on whether they are moving toward or away from you, in the light emitted by the rotating sun.

By combining these data sources, scientists have learned that the sun rotates the fastest at its equator, where it makes one rotation in 24.5 days, and the slowest at its poles, where a rotation takes 34 days or more. This latitude-based variation occurs from the sun's surface to the bottom of the convection zone, a layer of the sun that extends from about a third of the way to the core.

In that same region, the sun's rotation rate also varies by depth, Hoeksema said. Even deeper in the sun, the radiative zone — which lies between the convection zone and the sun's core — rotates like a solid, at a rate of about 26.6 days, regardless of the latitude.

Scientists are not entirely sure how fast the sun's core rotates, Hoeksema said, because researchers do not have good measurements there.

That's "something for people to figure out in the future," Hoeksema said.

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

There has not been a total solar eclipse since the "Great American Eclipse" on April 8, 2024 — but now, two are coming up in the next two years.

The first of these total solar eclipses, on Aug. 12, 2026, will grace parts of Greenland, Iceland and Spain. The second, on Aug. 2, 2027, will occur across parts of North Africa, southern Spain and the Middle East and is being dubbed the "eclipse of the century."

Here's what you need to know about the back-to-back sky spectacles.

The August 2026 solar eclipse

The 2026 total solar eclipse will begin as an eclipsed sunrise in a remote part of northern Siberia, with the path of totality — the path of the moon's dark central shadow, where a total eclipse is visible — sweeping across eastern Greenland, the west coast of Iceland and northern Spain, before concluding as an eclipsed sunset over the Mediterranean Sea.

For European observers, this marks the first total eclipse visible from mainland Europe since 1999. In Spain, cities like León, Burgos and Valladolid will be the best places to witness totality.

The eclipse will be visible about 10 degrees above the horizon, which is about the width of your fist held at arm's length.

Totality there will occur close to sunset, and clear skies are likely for both the eclipse and the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower later that night. It may even be possible to spot a meteor in the twilight-like skies of totality, which will last less than two minutes.

Travelers seeking the longest totality — just over two minutes — may head to Iceland's Snæfellsnes Peninsula or the fjords of eastern Greenland. At these latitudes in August, the nights are too short for reliable meteor spotting. However, the northern lights may make an appearance during the brief night or, perhaps, during a fleeting totality.

August 2027: The 'eclipse of the century'

Although any total solar eclipse is special, the 2027 event is a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.

The Aug. 2, 2027 total solar eclipse will last up to an extraordinary 6 minutes, 22 seconds and will be seen from a path of totality that touches parts of Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia.

This eclipse is already being billed as the "eclipse of the century," with observers near Luxor, Egypt, enjoying the longest land-based totality of the 21st century. Besides being the longest total solar eclipse of this era, this event is special for another reason: The climate in the path of totality means clear skies are likely throughout the region.

While these two total solar eclipses are already getting skywatchers excited, a lesser-known totality lies just beyond. On July 22, 2028, a total solar eclipse will cross Australia and New Zealand, with Sydney witnessing its first totality since 1857. For eclipse chasers across the globe, a boom time beckons.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a stunning time-lapse of a trio of solar eruptions exploding into space from the sun during an "artificial eclipse." The unique footage, captured by the newly operational Proba-3 mission, could help scientists unravel one of the biggest mysteries surrounding our home star, researchers say.

The Proba-3 mission consists of two probes, dubbed the coronagraph and the occulter, which were launched into a highly elliptical orbit around Earth in December 2024. By perfectly aligning the coronograph behind the occulter, scientists can view the sun with its bright center fully obscured, just like we see from the planet's surface during a solar eclipse — but more frequently and over longer periods of time. This allows researchers to study the hidden subtleties of the sun's faint atmosphere, or corona, like never before.

The new video, released by ESA on Jan. 19, shows footage from a five-hour "eclipse" on Sept. 2, 2025, sped up into a four-second clip. The yellow light surrounding the sun is the corona, viewed by Proba-3's coronograph with a helium filter. In the center, scientists have superimposed footage of the solar surface captured concurrently by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. With data from both spacecraft combined, researchers can see how the sun's surface and corona interact in unprecedented detail.

Three major plasma plumes shoot out of the sun during the video. At first glance, these look like solar flares — the massive explosions that can hurl solar storms toward Earth. However, when you look closely at the solar disk, there are no bright flashes, which are the telltale signs of a flare. Instead, what we are seeing are what researchers refer to as prominences, which are towering loops of plasma on the sun's surface that overextend and snap, flinging their ionized gas into space.

While they are less powerful than flares, prominences are equally valuable to researchers because they are usually harder to spot, Andrei Zhukov, a researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium and principal investigator of Proba-3's coronograph, explained in a statement. "Seeing so many prominence eruptions in such a short timeframe is rare, so I'm very happy we managed to capture them so clearly during our observation window."

The bright light emitted by the prominence eruptions suggests they are significantly hotter than the surrounding corona. But in reality, their plasma is much cooler — only "around 10,000 degrees" compared to the million-degree corona, Zhokov said.

The extremely high temperature of the corona, which is "around 200 times hotter than the sun's surface," is one of the sun's biggest remaining mysteries, Zhukov said. To date, scientists have struggled to explain why the corona is so much hotter than the rest of the sun, and footage like this could be the key to figuring it out, he added.

All eyes on the sun

Proba-3 has now observed at least 50 different artificial eclipses since beginning operations around seven months ago, and will hopefully collect hundreds more in the coming years, according to ESA. But it is not the only new technology that is making waves in the solar physics community.

For example, in June 2025, NASA's CODEX telescope, affixed to the exterior of the International Space Station, collected its first images of the sun, revealing never-before-seen perturbations in the corona linked to solar wind.

Last year, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and ESA's Solar Orbiter — both of which came online in 2021 — also captured the most detailed photo of the sun's surface and the first-ever image of the sun's south pole, respectively.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which has been repeatedly swooping closer to the sun than any spacecraft before it, has also captured some stunning photos of our home star that could help unravel multiple solar secrets.

All of these achievements have occurred while the sun was in its most active phase, or solar maximum, meaning they could provide clues to how powerful solar storms could impact our planet in the future.

Update, Wednesday (Jan. 21) at 11 a.m. ET: Geomagnetic conditions are starting to settle, but auroras are still highly likely in the northern tier of the United States tonight, according to NOAA's latest forecasts. Strong (G3-level) geomagnetic storms remain possible overnight, so be sure to check the skies after dark.

A "severe" and record-breaking geomagnetic storm rocked Earth's magnetic shield last night, shortly after the sun unleashed a powerful X-class solar flare. The epic event, triggered by a stream of superfast solar particles, painted widespread auroras at unusually low latitudes across the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in Europe.

Some outlets have reported that the storm is the "largest" of its kind since 2003, which is an exaggeration (the "Mother's Day storm" of May 2024 was much stronger). However, the latest outburst has broken a specific 23-year-old solar radiation record.

The geomagnetic storm began on Monday (Jan. 19), when a fast-moving cloud of solar radiation, or coronal mass ejection (CME), slammed into Earth's magnetosphere, temporarily disrupting the invisible magnetic field lines surrounding our planet and allowing charged particles to penetrate deeper into the atmosphere. The CME was initially released on Sunday (Jan. 18) when an X1.9 magnitude solar flare suddenly exploded from a dark patch near the sun's equator, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

Geomagnetic activity first peaked at 2:38 p.m. EST, when the storm reached G4 ("severe") status, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). The storm calmed slightly before reaching G4 status again at 3:23 a.m. EST on Tuesday (Jan. 20), according to a second SWPC report.

G4 is the second-highest level a geomagnetic storm can reach. Under these conditions, solar radiation can cause temporary radio blackouts, disrupt or damage orbiting spacecraft and impact some ground-based infrastructure. However, it is too early to tell what specific issues this storm caused, if any.

There were widespread aurora displays across the U.K. and parts of Europe — including France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Croatia — where the sun had already set before the storm peaked, according to Spaceweather.com.

Experts had predicted that up to 24 U.S. states would see auroras during the storm, according to Space.com. It is unclear if this actually happened, especially as the storm's first peak occurred before sunset in North America. However, skywatchers as far south as Alabama, Georgia, New Mexico and California reported seeing auroras overnight, according to Spaceweather.com.

More auroras are possible tonight, according to Space.com's latest aurora forecast. However, the storm is not expected to reintensify to G4 status.

A 23-year record

Despite some initial reports, last night's display was not the biggest geomagnetic storm of the past two decades. That title goes to the "Mother's Day storm" of May 2024, which reached G5 ("extreme") status for the first time since the infamous "Halloween solar storms" of 2003.

The 2024 storm was triggered by at least five successive CMEs that exploded from an unusually active sunspot, saturating the upper atmosphere with radiation for three days. This caused some of the most widespread auroras in centuries and temporarily transformed the "radiation belts" surrounding our planet.

However, while the latest storm did not reach the heights of 2024's disturbance, it was one of the most powerful "solar radiation storms" on record.

The term solar radiation storm refers to a solar outburst, like a CME, as it travels through space, rather than the actual effect it has on our planet. Big radiation storms often lead to powerful geomagnetic storms, but other factors influence how Earth's magnetic field will respond, such as the orientation of the incoming radiation and its magnetic configuration.

The solar radiation storm that sparked last night's auroras reached S4 ("severe") status — the equivalent of G4 on the solar radiation storm scale. This is the first time this has happened since 2003's Halloween storms, SWPC representatives wrote on the social platform X.

A record-breaking study into a giant sunspot that triggered Earth's biggest geomagnetic storm in more than two decades has revealed surprising new details about the explosive dark patch. The monster sunspot unleashed almost 1,000 solar flares in just over three months, and may have discreetly birthed the most powerful outburst of the current solar cycle.

Back in April 2024, astronomers spotted a growing group of sunspots on the solar surface. This new active region (AR), dubbed AR 13664, quickly swelled in size, eventually reaching a diameter 15 times wider than Earth by early May. It then quickly unleashed a barrage of X-class solar flares — the most powerful type of solar explosion — that fired a series of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) toward Earth, which successively slammed into our planet's magnetic field.

This triggered a G5-level ("extreme") geomagnetic storm between May 10 and May 13, which was the most powerful of its kind since 2003 and painted widespread auroras around the globe.

But the giant sunspot's journey didn't end there. Like other massive sunspots, AR 13664 was able to survive several trips around the sun, which enabled researchers to keep tabs on it for longer than usual — and it put on quite the show. (Sunspots only remain visible on the sun's Earth-facing hemisphere for up to two weeks at a time before rotating out of view, but they reappear if they survive the trip across our home star's far side.)

In a new study published Dec. 5 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers analyzed observations of AR 13664 spanning 94 consecutive days between April 16 and July 18, 2024, which equates to roughly 3.3 trips around the sun. Thanks to images captured by NASA's Solar Orbiter, which circles the sun, researchers were able to keep tabs on the sunspot as it rotated out of view.

"It’s a milestone in solar physics," study lead author Ioannis Kontogiannis, a solar physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), said in a statement. "This is the longest continuous series of images ever created for a single active region."

In the paper, the team revealed that AR 13664 unleashed a total of 969 solar flares. This included 38 X-class flares and 146 M-class flares, which are also capable of impacting Earth's magnetic field. The rest were lower-level, including C-class and B-class flares, which pose no threat to our planet. Most of the biggest flares were directed away from Earth, which is why more geomagnetic storms did not occur.

The largest flare was a suspected X16.5 magnitude blast, which occurred on the sun's far side from Earth on May 20, 2024. That’s significantly more powerful than an X9 blast that occurred on Oct. 3, 2024, which is currently listed as the most powerful flare of the last 8 years. However, as AR 13664's blast was partially obscured by its location on the sun, researchers cannot officially declare a new record.

AR 13664's epic journey around the sun is a reminder of the immense power of our home star, especially during solar maximum — the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle, when the number of sunspots and solar storms sharply rises.

We have likely just finished the most recent solar maximum, which started in early 2024, much earlier than scientists initially predicted it would. This peak phase was also much more active than previous maxima, with a 23-year peak in visible sunspots and a record number of X-class flares in 2024.

The researchers behind the new study note that studying these events can help scientists to better predict similar events in the future, which is important as they can impact Earth-orbiting spacecraft as well as some ground-based infrastructure.

"We live with this star, so it's really important we observe it and try to understand how it works and how it affects our environment," Kontogiannis said.

The sun is the biggest object in the solar system; at about 865,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) across, it's more than 100 times wider than Earth. Despite being enormous, our star is often called a "dwarf." So is the sun really a dwarf star?

Technically, the sun is a G-type main-sequence star — specifically, a G2V star. The "V" indicates that it is a dwarf, Tony Wong, a professor of astronomy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science.

Dwarf stars got their name when Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung noticed that the reddest stars he observed were either much brighter or much fainter than the sun. He called the brighter ones "giants" and the dimmer ones "dwarfs," according to Michael Richmond, a professor of physics and astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. The sun is currently more similar in size and brightness to smaller, dimmer stars called red dwarfs than to giant stars, so the sun and its brethren also became classified as dwarf stars.

"G" is astronomer code for yellow — that is, stars of a temperature range of around 9,260 to 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit (5,125 to 5,725 degrees Celsius), Lucas Guliano, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Live Science.

Wong noted that G2 means it's somewhat hotter than a typical G-type star. "They range from G0 to G9 in order of decreasing temperature," he said. At its surface, the sun is about 9,980 F (5,525 C), Guliano added.

Calling the sun yellow is a bit of a misnomer, however, as the sun's visible output is greatest in the green wavelengths, Guliano explained. But the sun emits all visible colors, so "the actual color of sunlight is white," Wong said.

(On Earth, the sun appears yellow because of the way molecules in the atmosphere can scatter the different colors that make up the sun's white light, according to Stanford University's Solar Center. This is the same reason the sky appears blue.)

G-type stars also range from G0 to G9 in order of decreasing size, Guliano said. Wong explained that class G stars "range in size from somewhere around 90% the mass of the sun up to around 110% the mass of the sun."

The sun is what astronomers call a main-sequence star, a class that includes most stars. Nuclear reactions within these stars fuse hydrogen to become helium, unleashing extraordinary amounts of energy. Among the main-sequence stars, the color is determined by the star's mass.

"The sun is yellow, but less-massive main sequence stars are orange or red, and more massive main sequence stars are blue," Carles Badenes, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, told Live Science.

The sun is slowly changing as it ages. "It has gotten about 10% larger since it started on the main sequence, and it will get much larger," Wong said. Even as it grows, however, the sun will still be considered a dwarf until its last stage of life.

In about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and begin to swell to become a red giant, leaving its dwarf days behind. "It will engulf the orbit of Venus, and maybe Earth as well," Badenes said, "and its surface temperature will get colder, making it red in color."

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

A gigantic cluster of sunspots — collectively around the same size as the one that birthed the largest solar storm in recorded history — has just emerged on the sun's Earth-facing side, and is now pointed directly at our planet. But don't panic! While auroras and some technological disturbances are possible over the coming week, the new sunspot complex seems unlikely to unleash a second Carrington Event.

The complex, dubbed AR 4294-4296, is made up of two different sunspot groups, AR 4294, and AR 4296, that are magnetically intertwined. It first became visible on Nov. 28, when it rotated onto the sun's Earth-facing side on our home star's western limb. However, the dark patches were first spotted around a week earlier by NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, which was spying on the sun's far side relative to Earth.

AR 4294-4296 is around the same size as a giant sunspot observed by British astronomer Richard Carrington in September 1859, which subsequently birthed the "Carrington Event" — the biggest solar storm ever seen by humans. The image above, first shared by Spaceweather.com on Dec. 2, shows the sunspot complex alongside Carrington's sketch of the giant 19th-century behemoth. At first glance, the new sunspot complex appears to be larger. However, in reality, its dark spots cover an area of the solar surface around 90% the size of the Carrington sunspot.

Sunspots have the capacity to unleash powerful blasts of radiation, or solar flares, when their invisible magnetic field lines contort and snap, unleashing energy into space. These explosive outbursts can trigger temporary radio blackouts on Earth and launch massive, fast-moving clouds of plasma, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs), at our planet. When this happens, it can subsequently cause disturbances in our planet's magnetic field, known as geomagnetic storms, which can interfere with electronics and paint vibrant auroras in the night sky.

The new dark patches are "one of the biggest sunspot groups of the past 10 years" and have the capacity to unleash supercharged X-class flares — the most powerful type on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s solar flare categorization system — Spaceweather.com representatives recently wrote. If it does blow and unleashes a CME, then the resulting solar storm "will be geoeffective," they added.

The Carrington Event unleashed an estimated X45 magnitude solar flare in 1859, which remains a record, although there is geological evidence that even more powerful blasts occurred long before humans emerged. For context, an X45 flare is more than five times stronger than the most powerful solar flare of the last decade — an X7 blast in October 2024.

If an equally powerful blast impacted Earth today, the radiation would knock out every satellite in orbit around our planet, recent simulations revealed. It would also wreak havoc on the ground, potentially damaging parts of the electrical grid. Experts estimate that the total damages would easily exceed $1 trillion.

If AR 4294-4296 is close in size to the sunspot that birthed the Carrington Event, that means a huge solar storm is likely, right? Well, yes and no.

Larger sunspots do have the potential to launch more powerful solar flares. For example, the sunspot that birthed a geomagnetic "superstorm" in May 2024 was more than 15 times wider than Earth. However, with sunspots, size isn't everything.

Whether or not a sunspot reaches its maximum explosive potential is also tied to the configuration of its magnetic field and the frequency with which it explodes, meaning that some giant sunspots can be completely harmless.

The magnetic fields of AR 4294-4296 are quite entangled, meaning that flares are possible, and the complex has already unleashed a potential X-class flare while still on the sun's farside, according to Spaceweather.com. However, despite this, experts say there is no clear sign of a superstorm on par with the Carrington Event in the immediate future.

Scientists will be keeping a particularly close eye on the magnetic field of the latest behemoth for signs of incoming activity. But if it happens to rotate past Earth without any outbursts, the hefty dark spots are likely large enough to survive more than one trip around the sun, meaning they could be back for "round two" sometime closer to Christmas.

The sun has been particularly active in recent years, because it has recently been in the most active phase of its roughly 11-year solar cycle, known as solar maximum.

That has fueled several recent X-class flares, including two back-to-back explosions, which triggered a G4 (severe) geomagnetic storm between Nov. 11-12. In fact, 2024 had the highest number of X-class flares in a single year since modern records began in 1996.

A lot of these flares have triggered geomagnetic storms on Earth, including the extreme disturbance in May 2024, which was the most powerful of its kind for 21 years and triggered some of the most widespread auroras in centuries.

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

An astrophotographer has captured a spectacular shot of a falling skydiver perfectly aligned with the fiery surface of the sun, making it seem like the airborne adventurer is tumbling through the vacuum of space in front of our home star.

Andrew McCarthy, an Arizona-based astrophotographer who specializes in photographing the sun, captured the unlikely photo on Saturday (Nov. 8) at around 9 a.m. MST (11 am EST). The shot, dubbed "The Fall of Icarus," required an "absolutely preposterous" level of planning and "might be the first photo of its kind in existence," McCarthy wrote in a post on the social platform X.

The skydiver in the image was the YouTuber and musician Gabriel C. Brown, who jumped from a small propeller-powered craft at an altitude of around 3,500 feet (1,070 meters), around 8,000 feet (2,440 m) from McCarthy's camera. Brown shared several behind-the-scenes photos of the shoot in an Instagram post, including a video of him and McCarthy celebrating the shot.

"You can see the excitement on my face in the videos," McCarthy told Live Science. "Seeing it perfectly captured on my monitors was exhilarating."

The image was captured on the first and only jump of the day, McCarthy added. However, despite weeks of meticulous planning, it took six attempts to properly line up the aircraft with the sun. You can see the exact moment Clarke jumped in a video posted to X by McCarthy (see below).

"It was a narrow field of view, so it took several attempts to line up the shot," McCarthy added. "We only had one shot at the jump as repacking the parachute safely would take too long for another."

The biggest issue the pair faced was that the aircraft they used was a lot harder to reliably track through the sky than they first thought, McCarthy said. "Capturing the sun is something I'm quite familiar with, but this added new challenges."

McCarthy added that the new photo is comfortably one of the "top 5" he has taken during his career to date.

In the last few months, he has also captured other solar transit photos, including a "once-in-a-lifetime" shot of the International Space Station photobombing a solar flare and a SpaceX rocket appearing to cut through the solar disk.

In the past, he has also snapped an incredible shot of a 1-million-mile-long (1.6 million km) plasma plume erupting from the sun, as well as an ultra-high-definition photo of the lunar surface and a striking image of Mars being eclipsed by the moon.

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.

A hot mystery on the sun may be close to being solved.

For decades, scientists have been trying to understand why the sun's outer atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface, despite being farther from the core. Whereas the surface, or photosphere, is millions of degrees Fahrenheit, the outer atmosphere is only about 10,000 F (5,500 C).

Now, thanks to observations from a new high-resolution telescope, scientists have finally spotted elusive "magnetic waves" in the sun's atmosphere that may be responsible for much of the corona's incredible heating. The findings were published Oct. 24 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

New data from the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii — the largest ground-based solar telescope ever built — is helping scientists learn how the sun's energy is transported through its atmosphere.

A solar mystery

Researchers previously noted the extreme temperature of the sun's corona, as well as the supercharged flow of heated gas, called the solar wind, which streams from the sun at more than 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h), said Richard Morton, a solar physicist and professor at Northumbria University in the U.K. who led the research, told Live Science in an email.

Both processes need energy, and scientists assumed rolling convection at the sun's surface generated the requisite fuel. But complications arose during the first studies of this decades ago.

"It is unclear how this [energy] gets transferred into the atmosphere and solar wind, and how the energy is converted to heat and momentum," Morton said.

In 1942, Swedish plasma physicist (and eventual Nobel Prize winner) Hannes Alfvén suggested magnetic waves may be responsible. But these waves, now known as Alfvén waves, had never been spotted in the corona until now.

"This was because the sensitivity of previous instrumentation has not been good enough to resolve the motions of the Alfvén waves," Morton said. "Despite this, many numerical experiments and space weather forecasting tools assume that Alfvén waves exist in the corona. However, the properties of the waves they use within the models have been educated guesses."

'Unprecedented' observations

DKIST has a 4-meter (13 feet) mirror and an "unprecedented" resolution of the sun, Morton said, with much "cleaner measurements" (less noise) than any prior solar observatory. In the new research, scientists used the telescope's Cryogenic Near Infrared Spectropolarimeter (Cryo-NIRSP) to search for the coronal Alfvén waves.

Cryo-NIRSP can chart movements of the corona through images, Morton said, as well as examine changes in the sun's plasma (superheated gas) through a phenomenon known as Doppler shift — the perceived difference in the frequency of a wave as the observer and the source of the wave move toward or away from each other. (A common, real-life example is the change in the sound of an ambulance siren as it passes by a pedestrian on the street.)

"Cryo-NIRSP provided the data to enable us to observe the tell-tale signature of the Alfvén waves, which in a plasma like the corona, is a back-and-forth twisting of the magnetic field," Morton said. "This appears as an alternating pattern of red and blue Doppler shifts on opposite sides of the magnetic fields. We found these waves were continually present during the time of observation, and given there was nothing particularly special about the region we observed, this implies they are always likely common across the rest of the atmosphere.”

"Perhaps most importantly," he continued, "our analysis indicates that waves likely carry a significant amount of energy."

That is a significant finding, he noted, because astronomers have been debating between solar waves and magnetic reconnection — when magnetic fields on the sun twist together and snap, releasing energy — as the mechanism behind the intense heating in the corona.

While various spacecraft have found evidence that magnetic reconnection is a driver of coronal heating, the new findings from DKIST show that the full picture is more complicated. Solar observatories such as NASA's Parker Solar Probe and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, alongside the fresh data from DKIST, show "both waves and reconnection are occurring frequently throughout the Sun's atmosphere," Morton said.

"Our research confirms that the Alfvén waves are present and carry a significant amount of energy, potentially making up at least half the required energy for heating the corona," he added. "However, the exact energy associated with the waves is still challenging to estimate."

The ratio of magnetic reconnection to Alfvén waves affects not only solar heating but also the light (or more properly, the radiative output) from the sun, as well as the light from stars beyond our solar system. Scientists hope to use the research to understand how planetary systems evolved over the longer term and to make better short-term predictions about solar wind production. "It is hoped that further studies like the one we have published will shed some light on the properties of Alfvén waves to better inform the models and improve predictions," he said.

NASA scientists are warning that the sun may be "waking up" from a brief period of relative inactivity, contradicting past assumptions about our home star. If true, this could mean that decades of potentially dangerous space weather are in store.

The sun follows a roughly 11-year cycle of solar activity that begins with a prolonged quiet period, known as solar minimum, and builds toward an explosive peak, known as solar maximum — when our home star frequently spits out powerful solar storms at us. This pattern is known as the "sunspot cycle," because the number of dark patches on the sun's surface rises and falls with solar activity. The sunspot cycle is, in turn, governed by a longer 22-year cycle, known as the Hale Cycle — during which the sun's magnetic field entirely flips and then reverses back again.

But in addition to the sunspot and Hale cycles, the sun also experiences long-term fluctuations in solar activity that can span multiple decades and are much harder to predict or explain. Examples include periods between 1645 to 1715, known as the Maunder Minimum, and between 1790 and 1830, known as the Dalton Minimum, when solar activity was generally much lower throughout successive sunspot cycles.

Back in the early 2000s, downward trending solar activity led some scientists to believe that we were possibly entering a new "deep solar minimum." This theory gained traction after the last solar maximum, between 2013 and 2014, which was much weaker than previous cycles. However, the current sunspot cycle, which has just peaked, has massively upended this theory.

In a new study, published Sept. 8 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers analyzed multiple metrics of solar activity, including solar wind, magnetic field strength and sunspot numbers, and found that they have been on an upward trend since around 2008, and could rise further over future cycles, suggesting that the deep solar minimum theory is well and truly dead.

Related: 10 supercharged solar storms that blew us away in 2024

"All signs were pointing to the sun going into a prolonged phase of low activity," study lead author Jamie Jasinski, a plasma physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a NASA statement. "So it was a surprise to see that trend reversed. The sun is slowly waking up."

We are currently coming towards the end of the sun's most recent solar maximum, which officially began in early 2024, and it has not played out as expected.

When the current sunspot cycle began in late 2019, experts from the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) — which includes scientists from NASA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — predicted that solar maximum would most likely begin sometime in 2025 and be comparable to the previous weaker cycle.

However, as the current cycle progressed, it quickly became clear that this was not the case and that solar maximum would arrive sooner and be much more active than initially predicted. SWPC scientists later acknowledged their mistake, issuing their first-ever updated forecast, which came just in time for solar maximum's arrival.

Since then, the sun has reached its highest number of sunspots in more than 20 years and spat out a record number of powerful X-class flares — the most powerful type of explosion the sun is capable of producing.

During the current maximum, Earth has also been hit by several major geomagnetic storms, or disturbances to the planet's magnetic field. The most noteworthy was an "extreme" event in May 2024, which triggered some of the most vibrant aurora displays in centuries and caused over $500 million in damages.

Now, the new study warns that what we have witnessed over the past few years will likely become the "status quo" over the next few decades. This could be especially problematic because humanity has become much more reliant on technologies that are prone to interference from space weather, such as power grids, GPS-controlled machinery and Earth-orbiting satellites, which can be knocked out of the sky by solar storms.

It is currently unclear why the sun experienced a blip in solar activity over the last few decades or what may be driving its current resurgence: "The longer-term trends are a lot less predictable and are something we don't completely understand yet," Jasinski said.

Another study from earlier this year proposed that the recent surge in activity could be part of a lesser-known and understudied 100-year solar cycle, known as the Centennial Gleissberg Cycle. However, the newest study does not mention this at all.

A gigantic, backwards "letter S" recently appeared slap bang in the middle of the sun, moments before our home star unleashed a massive plume of plasma that later smashed into Earth, temporarily disrupting our planet's magnetic field.

The bizarre S-shaped structure, which bears a resemblance to the iconic symbol of Superman, took shape on Sept. 4, less than an hour before an M-class solar flare launched a giant magnetized cloud of plasma stretching up to 435,000 miles (700,000 kilometers) across, Spaceweather.com reported. This plasma plume, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), appeared dark against the sun's surface because its plasma is significantly cooler than its surroundings, similar to why sunspots appear black.

This "dark eruption" smashed into Earth's magnetic field, or magnetosphere, on Sunday (Sept. 7), temporarily disturbing our planet's protective shield. This disturbance, known as a geomagnetic storm, occurred around the same time as a "blood moon" total lunar eclipse, which was visible across large parts of the globe. However, the storm only reached G1 (minor) status, meaning it did not generate many visible auroras in the U.S. or at similar latitudes, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

This rare type of solar outburst is known as a "sigmoid eruption," named after the Greek letter sigma, which corresponds phonetically to "S" in English. In this case, the "S" appeared just above the sun's equator, right in the center of the hemisphere facing Earth, and was roughly 78,000 miles (125,000 km) across at its widest point — around 10 times the diameter of Earth.

Related: A mysterious, 100-year solar cycle may have just restarted — and it could mean decades of dangerous space weather

Sigmoid eruptions occur when the localized magnetic fields surrounding sunspots get twisted up "like a slinky" at each end of the bar that runs through their center, causing the entire structure to snake, according to Spaceweather.com.

The shape makes it almost certain that the sunspot will create a solar flare because the magnetic field holding it together more readily snaps when the opposite ends of the magnetic field are closer together, flinging plasma away from the sun in the process, Spaceweather.com representatives added. "When you see an 'S' on the sun, it usually means something is about to explode," they wrote.

A similar structure was also seen shortly before a supercharged X9.3 magnitude solar flare in September 2017, which, at the time of the event, was the most powerful solar explosion in almost a decade, according to a 2024 study.

Researchers first noticed the explosive potential of sigmoid eruptions in the late 2000s. However, they are still trying to work out exactly what causes them to take this shape.

The classical explanation for the S shape is that it emerges when two J-shape structures — the most common shape that precedes solar flares — merge end-to-end into a single entity. However, a 2022 study hinted that it is more likely that a single J-shape structure is transformed into an S via "slipping" of its associated magnetic field.

Increased solar activity

Solar activity has been peaking over the last few years due to the solar maximum — the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle, when the number and size of sunspots and solar storms rise sharply.

This explosive peak was initially predicted to be fairly tame compared to recent solar maxima. However, the initial forecasts were inaccurate, and the current maximum arrived early and has been far more active than expected.

Solar maximum has now likely come to an end. However, solar activity is expected to remain relatively high in the coming months due to continued instability within our home star's magnetic fields.

The last few weeks have seen a mini-resurgence in space weather events, including a giant "solar tornado" that raged above the sun's surface for several days in late August, and a "cannibal" CME that painted auroras above multiple U.S. states on Labor Day (Sept. 1).

A "cannibalistic" solar storm is about to slam into Earth's magnetic field, triggering vibrant auroras that will potentially be visible in up to 18 different U.S. states, just in time for Labor Day.

On Saturday (Aug. 30), sunspot 4204, located near the sun's equator, unleashed a long-duration, M-class solar flare — the second most powerful type of eruption our home star's surface is capable of producing. The M2.7 magnitude blast, which occurred over more than 3 hours, also spat out a fast-moving cloud of magnetized plasma, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), which NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft revealed was "heading straight for Earth," according to Spaceweather.com.

However, less than 24 hours later, further analysis of the Earthbound solar storm revealed that it was actually made up of two different CMEs that had been ejected back-to-back during the flare, space weather expert and forecaster Tabitha Skov, wrote on X. Since then, the second and largest of the two plasma clouds has caught up to and consumed the first, creating a larger and more chaotic mass, known as a cannibal CME, that will hit Earth's magnetic field in the later hours of today (Sept. 1).

When the conjoined solar storms arrive, the resulting impact will temporarily disrupt our planet's protective shield, allowing charged particles to penetrate deep into the atmosphere where they can excite gas molecules and trigger the Northern Lights.

The disturbance, known as a geomagnetic storm, will likely reach G2 (moderate) class, but could also escalate to a G3 (strong) storm at its peak, according to a recent forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center.

Related: A mysterious, 100-year solar cycle may have just restarted — and it could mean decades of dangerous space weather

The resulting auroras will be visible much farther south in the U.S. than normal, potentially appearing in as many as 18 states. These will include Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, South Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, New York, Wyoming, Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

The auroras will likely be most visible in the early hours of tomorrow (Sept. 2) and will be clearest in areas away from major cities, where there is minimal light pollution. But if you cannot see them with the naked eye, you may still be able to photograph them.

Cannibal solar storms are rare. However, there have been several examples in recent years, including a significant event in December 2023 and another example in August last year.

There have also been several major geomagnetic storms in the last 18 months, including a supercharged G5 (extreme) disturbance in May 2024, which painted widespread auroras across the globe, scrambled GPS systems and birthed a new "radiation belt" around our planet. Experts have since revealed that the damages from this storm exceeded $500 million.

The recent peak in solar activity can be attributed to solar maximum — the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle, when the number and size of sunspots and solar storms rise sharply.

Experts now believe that the current solar maximum has likely come to a close. However, there has been a mini-resurgence in activity in recent weeks, such as a giant solar tornado that raged on the sun's surface for multiple days in late August.

Solar activity will also likely remain high in the coming months and years due to continued instability within the sun's magnetic field.

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."

A giant solar tornado and a massive plasma eruption were just raging on the surface of the sun at the same time — and a researcher has captured both in one spectacular image.

Although the solar events are unrelated, both are the result of disturbances in the sun's invisible magnetic field, with some plasma forced into a tornado shape and some plasma released in a towering eruption known as an eruptive prominence.

Maximilian Teodorescu, a researcher at the Institute of Space Science in Romania, captured both events happening simultaneously Wednesday (Aug. 20). He told Live Science that a large solar tornado is pretty rare and he's never seen one at the same time as an eruptive prominence.

Spaceweather.com reported that astronomers around the world have been monitoring the tornado on the sun's surface this week, with the earliest images emerging Sunday (Aug. 17). Solar tornadoes look like tornadoes on Earth, but the two phenomena have little in common otherwise, particularly when it comes to size.

"[The solar tornado is] about 130,000 kilometers [80,000 miles] high," Teodorescu said. "Basically a tenth of the diameter of the sun."

To put that into perspective, Earth is around 7,926 miles (12,756 km) wide, so this tornado is a little taller than 10 Earths stacked on top of each other. Solar tornadoes are typically around 15,500 to 62,000 miles (25,000 to 100,000 km) tall, so this one is a whopper.

Teodorescu estimated that the eruptive prominence was around 124,000 miles (200,000 km) wide. That's roughly similar in size to a giant solar prominence observed in July, which was estimated at more than 100,000 miles (165,000 km) across and nicknamed "The Beast."

Related: Astrophotographer snaps 'once-in-a-lifetime' shot of solar flare photobombing the ISS

Teodorescu first saw the solar tornado on the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) website Monday (Aug. 18). GONG, which is operated by the National Solar Observatory, has six identical solar telescopes that monitor the sun in almost real time from different countries around the world, allowing amateurs and professionals to stay updated on solar activity.

Teodorescu's wife and fellow Institute of Space Science researcher Eliza Teodorescu helped him align a telescope's field of view with the tornado so he could capture images of the event. The eruptive prominence then emerged, allowing him to snap both at the same time.

Earth's tornadoes are whipped up by intense winds and move around, while solar tornadoes are made of ionized gas (plasma) that's rooted in place. They are formally called tornado prominences, with regular prominences also held in place by magnetic fields.

Prominences are attached to the visible surface of the sun, or photosphere, and extend into the star's outer atmosphere, or corona, according to NASA. An eruptive prominence occurs when the magnetic field holding the plasma becomes unstable and bursts outward. (Lucky skywatchers got a chance to see prominences erupting in real time during the April 8 total solar eclipse last year.)

In many cases, the plasma released in a prominence then flies into space as a coronal mass ejection (CME). This type of solar storm can collide with Earth's magnetic field and create auroras, as well as disrupt our satellites and communication systems.

Maximilian Teodorescu noted that the eruptive prominence he photographed released a CME. But it isn't heading for us, so it won't result in any disruptions or northern lights displays, he said. Earth is, however, currently being buffeted by solar winds because of other solar activity, so auroras could be visible at high latitudes tonight, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

The sun is currently in the most active phase of its roughly 11-year solar cycle — known as solar maximum — when the star's magnetic field weakens and flips. Maximilian Teodorescu noted that there's a lot of solar activity to see even with a small telescope — provided it is safely equipped with a solar filter.

"It's the most dynamic thing you can actually see as both [an] amateur and a professional in the sky," he said.

An Earth-orbiting spacecraft just experienced an unusual phenomenon: a lunar transit and an Earth eclipse on the same day.

On July 25, at different times, both the moon and Earth passed between NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the sun.

SDO studies the sun's activity, including the solar wind (the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun), solar flares and changes in the sun's magnetic field. These data help scientists forecast solar activity that can affect Earth. The spacecraft launched in February 2010 and has been observing the sun almost continuously since May of that year.

To keep a constant eye on the sun, SDO is in a geosynchronous orbit around Earth, meaning it circles the planet once every day. The plane of its orbit is angled relative to Earth's rotational axis, which keeps the planet out of the way of its observations. This means the spacecraft usually has a view of the sun.

But occasionally, the moon blocks that view. Several times per year, the moon partially eclipses the sun from SDO's perspective. The July 25 lunar transit, which began around 2:45 UTC, was SDO's fourth partial eclipse since April, according to SDO's blog. It was also the deepest, covering up to 62% of the sun's disk and lasting about 50 minutes.

Earth also occasionally passes between SDO and the sun. SDO's orbit is designed to minimize these interruptions to the craft's regular observations, but roughly twice per year, Earth blocks out the sun for a short period each day. Each of these "eclipse seasons" lasts around three weeks, according to NASA. SDO is in the midst of its 31st eclipse season, which began July 10 and will last until Aug. 7.

Beginning around 6:30 UTC, about three hours after the moon finished its transit, Earth completely blocked SDO's view of the sun. The total eclipse ended shortly before 8:00 UTC, according to the Solar Dynamics Observatory blog.

The two events look a bit different in SDO's images of the sun. Because Earth's atmosphere absorbs some sunlight, its shadow has a fuzzy edge. Meanwhile, the moon, which has no atmosphere, carves a crisp circle out of the sun's disk.

This isn't the first time both Earth and the moon have gotten in SDO's way on the same day. In 2015 — and again in 2016 — both bodies eclipsed the sun from SDO's perspective at the same time, resulting in a "double eclipse."

Earth-bound eclipse spotters will have to wait a few more weeks to catch the next event. A partial solar eclipse will be visible from New Zealand and parts of Australia on Sept. 21. The next total solar eclipse — which will be visible from parts of Greenland, Iceland, Russia, Spain and Portugal — will occur on Aug. 12, 2026.

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

A giant plasma plume dubbed "The Beast" was recently spotted dancing above the sun as it showered our home star with blobs of impossibly fast fire. The shapeshifting projection, which stretched more than 13 times wider than Earth, was the first of several sizable solar structures to emerge in recent days.

The animalistic mass appeared Saturday (July 12) over the northwestern limb of the sun, allowing photographers from around the world to snap some stunning shots, including Michael Jäger, who captured the plume from Martinsburg in Austria (see above); and Simon Metcalfe, who saw it from near his home in Gloucestershire, England (see below).

Astrophotographer Daid Wilson also captured an amazing movie of the entire event from Inverness in Scotland, revealing that the morphing plume stretched more than 100,000 miles (165,000 km) across.

The plume was at its peak size for around three hours and constantly changed shape during this time. "It looks to me like some huge 4-legged beast shuffling along," Wilson told Spaceweather.com.

This quote was picked up on several social media outlets, including Reddit and X, leading people to refer to the plume as "The Beast."

Related: 10 supercharged solar storms that blew us away in 2024

The Beast is a solar prominence — a "bright feature extending outward from the sun's surface," made from ionized gas, or plasma, that is held in place by invisible magnetic field lines anchored to the solar surface, according to NASA.

These structures are usually small but can grow to be more than 1 million miles (1.6 million km) long and can be seen hovering around the sun's disk during eclipses, such as during the 2024 total solar eclipse over North America.

In the new images, smaller blobs of plasma can also be seen falling from The Beast toward the sun's surface. This is known as "coronal rain" and occurs when plasma cools and condenses, causing it to fall back to the sun's surface at extreme speeds as it travels along the invisible magnetic field lines.

Prominences, which commonly form in a looped horseshoe shape, can also unleash solar storms, such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), when the magnetic fields that hold them up snap like an overstretched elastic band, flinging the plasma off into space. If these solar storms collide with Earth's magnetic field, they can trigger geomagnetic disturbances, which can cause radio blackouts, satellite disruption and vibrant aurora displays. But in this case, no CME was released, meaning The Beast poses no threat to our planet.

Two more large prominences have also appeared on the sun in recent days: First, on Monday (July 14), and then again on Tuesday (July 15). Both of these structures were larger than The Beast, with a much more traditional shape, and unleashed CMEs. However, due to the angle from which they were released from the sun, neither of the solar storms will hit Earth, according to EarthSky.org.

The recent flurry of activity is a reminder that the sun is currently nearing 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.

NASA has released the closest-ever photos of the sun, taken by the Parker Solar Probe at just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the star's surface. The new images reveal important features in the solar wind that will help scientists understand the origins of this mysterious space weather phenomenon and its effects on life on Earth.

The solar wind is the constant stream of charged particles — mainly protons and electrons — released by the sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona. This torrent of matter speeds through the solar system at more than a million miles an hour, combining with magnetic fields and material jettisoned from the sun to create auroras, strip planetary atmospheres, and generate electric currents that can interfere with power networks on Earth. Understanding and predicting this space weather is vital to protecting astronauts and spacecrafts, and minimizing the disruptions to infrastructure sometimes caused by strong solar activity.

Launched in 2018, the Parker Solar Probe is the first spacecraft to have entered the sun's corona. Equipped with an array of scientific instrumentation including the Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) and Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP), the unmanned ship braves blistering heat and fierce radiation to provide researchers on Earth with detailed data about the sun and its close surroundings.

In its record-breaking flyby of the sun on December 24th last year, the Parker Solar Probe captured images showing how this wind behaves shortly after leaving the corona and, crucially, recorded collisions between unpredictable bubbles of plasma and magnetic fields called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

"In these images, we're seeing the CMEs basically piling up on top of one another," said Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR instrument scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in a press release. "We're using this to figure out how the CMEs merge together, which can be important for space weather."

There are two types of solar wind: fast solar wind travels at up to 800 kilometres per second, creating a relatively uniform torrent of matter. Meanwhile slow solar wind is denser and more unpredictable, blowing in gusts rather than a constant stream.

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

Around Earth we tend to experience solar winds as more of a consistent breeze. But earlier data from the Parker Solar Probe revealed that these gusts ramp up in intensity closer to the sun, with additional turbulence in the form of zigzagging magnetic fields called switchbacks at distances of 14.7 million miles (23.6 million km) from the surface. These switchbacks are thought to originate from magnetic funnels created by visible patches on the sun's exterior and, in 2024, scientists declared the fast solar wind is partially powered by this phenomenon.

However, the slow solar wind — its denser and more variable sibling — has remained more of a mystery.

"The big unknown has been: how is the solar wind generated, and how does it manage to escape the Sun's immense gravitational pull?" Nour Rawafi, the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement. "Understanding this continuous flow of particles, particularly the slow solar wind, is a major challenge, especially given the diversity in the properties of these streams — but with Parker Solar Probe, we're closer than ever to uncovering their origins and how they evolve."

Previous observations had suggested there were potentially two types of slow solar wind — Alfvénic, which has small magnetic switchbacks, and non-Alfvénic, which doesn't. In its latest pass, the Parker Solar Probe was finally able to confirm this long-held hypothesis. Furthermore, the new detailed pictures are helping scientists to understand the origin of each of these distinct phenomena — the Alfvénic wind possibly comes from coronal holes on cooler regions of the corona while non-Alfvénic winds could be released from hot magnetic loops called helmet streamers. "We don't have a final consensus yet, but we have a whole lot of new intriguing data," said Adam Szabo, Parker Solar Probe mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland in the statement.

The probe will continue to collect data as it orbits the sun and is expected to next pass its perihelion — the closest point to the sun's surface — on the 15th of September.

Location signals beamed to Earth by GPS satellites were off by hundreds of feet during the Gannon Solar Storm in May last year, and the disruption lasted for up to two days in some U.S. regions, a new study has revealed. The outage wreaked havoc across the farming sector, which suffered losses of more than $500 million as a result.

A succession of powerful solar eruptions in early May last year triggered the most powerful solar storm to hit Earth in 20 years. Later named after the deceased space weather scientist Jennifer Gannon, the solar storm produced awe-inspiring auroras visible as far south as Mexico, Portugal and Spain. It also made GPS go haywire for days.

Farmers in the American Midwest, at that time at the peak of the planting season, reported their GPS-guided tractors acting like they were "possessed" during the storm, according to accounts. A new study has now quantified how big those GPS errors were not only during the height of the storm, but also in its aftermath when a lingering aurora continued to skew GPS signals.

A team of researchers from Boston University used data from close to 100 high-accuracy, fixed GPS receivers scattered across the U.S. that form a seismic research network that measures the motions of tectonic plates. As it turns out, the network is also perfectly suited to study space weather effects in Earth's ionosphere, a layer of electrically-charged air found 30 miles (48 kilometers) above Earth. The effects that solar storms have on the ionosphere can affect the readings of GPS receivers.

"GPS receivers work with the assumption that the ionosphere has a uniform plasma density," Waqar Younas, a space physics researcher at Boston University and lead author of the paper, told Space.com. "But a solar storm creates irregularities in the ionosphere and as the signal passes through the ionospheric layers, it grows errors."

When a solar storm hits, the charged solar particles it brings with it heat up and disturb the ionosphere. As the weak signals from the global positioning satellites pass through this suddenly turbulent region, they get thrown off course.

Related: Pink 'raindrops' on the sun captured in greatest detail ever

Because the fixed GPS receivers in the research network are firmly attached to the ground, any change in their positioning data could only be a result of turbulence in the ionosphere. Measurements from this scientific GPS network revealed the scale of these errors with great accuracy, and enabled researchers to reconstruct what had gone on in the ionosphere during the storm.

"By measuring the disturbance of the signal, we can tell the structure of the plasma in the upper atmosphere," Toshi Nishimura, a professor of space physics and co-author of the new study, told Space.com.

Analysis of the data revealed that the storm created a "wall of ionospheric plasma," stretching across the North American continent. This wall threw off GPS signals by up to 230 feet (70 meters) in central U.S. states, with smaller errors of up to 65 feet (20 m) reported in the southwestern parts of the country.

The peak disruption lasted for about six hours on May 10, 2024, but things remained unsettled for up to two days, the study showed. After the shaken ionosphere began to calm down, the auroral lights triggered by the storm caused further GPS disruptions as charged particles from space trickled through the atmosphere along disrupted magnetic field lines. The GPS receiver network showed errors up to 30 feet (10 m) for the duration of these auroras.

The erratic behavior of GPS-guided farming machinery caused by the Gannon solar storm cost American farmers in the U.S. midwest more than $500 million, according to Terry Griffin, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University.

"Because of the Gannon storm, planting of corn got delayed because our planters were mostly inoperative," Griffin told Space.com. "Currently, about 70% of planted acres in the United States rely on equipment that uses GPS automated guidance to make straight parallel lines through the field. We no longer even have physical road markers, and the equipment is getting bigger to the point that we can no longer operate when the GPS is taken away."

But agriculture was not the sole victim of the space weather-induced GPS mayhem. Aircraft rely on GPS not only to follow their paths but especially to know their precise altitude during landing. Errors of up to four meters can be compensated for, according to Nishimura. But the disruption on May 10 and 11 last year was "way beyond that tolerance window," Nishimura said.

The Gannon solar storm may have been the strongest in two decades. But it only provided only a weak taste of what the sun is capable of. The frequently discussed worst case scenario is the so-called Carrington event — a storm that hit Earth in 1859, knocking out telegraph services all over the world. A storm of that strength today would no doubt have wide-ranging consequences around the world.

"During the Gannon storm, we saw the most intense impact in the central regions of the U.S.," Nishimura said. "But for a Carrington-sized event, we would see disruption all over the continent and errors so large that the signal would be unusable."

Waqar says that in the future, real-time forecasting of ionospheric disruptions paired with AI-driven forecasts of GPS signal irregularities could help correct the errors as a storm progresses.

The study was published in the journal JGR-Space Physics on June 9.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

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.

A mini solar telescope strapped to the side of the International Space Station (ISS) has captured its first images, revealing subtle changes in our home star's outer atmosphere that have never been seen before.

NASA's Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX) is a small solar telescope attached to the outside of the ISS. It is a coronagraph, meaning that it blocks out the solar disk to allow the telescope to focus on the sun's atmosphere, or corona, in unprecedented detail — mimicking the way the moon blocks the sun's visible surface during a total solar eclipse on Earth. The occulting disk blocking out the sun's light is around the size of a tennis ball and it is held in place by three metal arms at the end of a long metal tube, which also cast distinctive shadows in the resulting images.

CODEX arrived on the ISS on Nov. 5, 2024, on board a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule, Live Science's sister site Space.com previously reported. It was affixed onto the station's hull by the robotic arm, Canadarm2, on Nov. 9, according to NASA.

The first photos from CODEX were released on June 10 at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska. They include footage of temperature fluctuations in the outer corona, captured over the span of several days, and a photo of giant "coronal streamers" shooting out of the sun.

"The CODEX instrument is doing something new," Jeffrey Newmark, a heliophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and the principal investigator for CODEX, said in a statement. "These are brand new observations that have never been seen before, and we think there's a lot of really interesting science to be done with it."

Related: Watch eerie 'UFOs' and a solar 'cyclone' take shape in stunning new ESA video of the sun

The main goal of the new telescope is to discover how the superhot particles constantly streaming out of the sun, known as the solar wind, interact with the sun's outer atmosphere. "Previous coronagraph experiments have measured the density of material in the corona, but CODEX is measuring the temperature and speed of material in the slowly varying solar wind flowing out from the Sun," Newmark said.

Mission scientists also want to understand how solar wind gets heated to such high temperatures — up to 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius), which is around 175 times hotter than the sun's surface, according to Space.com.

To do this, the telescope measures the sun using four narrow-band filters, two for temperature and two for speed. "By comparing the brightness of the images in each of these filters, we can tell the temperature and speed of the coronal solar wind," Newmark said.

The researchers hope that better understanding the solar wind will help predict dangerous space weather events, particularly those that originate from gigantic "coronal holes" that spew streams of particularly fast solar particles toward Earth.

In the last few weeks, Earth has experienced two significant geomagnetic storms, which were both triggered by coronal holes: First, on June 13, when a sizeable storm triggered auroras in up to 18 U.S. states; and more recently on June 25, when a slightly weaker disturbance briefly lit up the night skies.

This flurry of activity is the result of solar maximum, the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year sunspot cycle. This chaotic peak is now likely coming to an end, meaning less explosive outbursts in the future. However, some experts believe that solar wind could remain unpredictable for several years as the sun's localized magnetic fields vie for dominance in a period dubbed the "solar battle zone." Therefore, the CODEX instrument has likely switched on at the optimal time.

"We really never had the ability to do this kind of science before," Newmark said. "We're excited for what's to come."

A "hole" in the sun is sending a high-speed stream of charged particles toward our planet, which could make dancing auroras visible from about 15 U.S. states tonight (June 25).

The auroras are predicted to be most intense over Alaska and Canada, but they could potentially also be seen across the north of the contiguous U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center.

"The aurora may become visible over some northern and upper Midwest states from New York to Idaho," representatives for the Space Weather Prediction Center wrote in an update.

If skywaters are treated to a northern lights display tonight, it will be thanks to a coronal hole in the sun's atmosphere. These less-dense areas of the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, enable streams of charged particles, or solar wind, to escape into space at high speeds. When these high-speed streams collide with Earth, they can increase geomagnetic activity, which produces auroras.

The Space Weather Prediction Center is anticipating that the coronal hole streams will trigger a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm. The geomagnetic storm scale ranges from G1 to G5, with G5 being the most severe. Storms of a G2 magnitude aren't rare but can produce strong auroras.

The U.K.'s Met Office has forecast minor to moderate (G1 to G2) geomagnetic storms on Wednesday, though it noted that a strong G3 storm can't be ruled out.

Related: 32 stunning photos of auroras seen from space

Why do auroras appear?

Auroras occur 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.

The auroras are expected to form above Alaska and Canada, with the light show's southern extent just grazing the northern edge of the contiguous U.S. However, auroras don't have to be directly overhead for people to see them and can be observed from as far as 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) away, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.

Auroras are typically best viewed just after sunset or just before sunrise. However, they are tricky to predict, and there's no guarantee that people living in northern states will be able to see anything on the northern horizon.

Geomagnetic activity is expected to drop after tonight, with a minor G1 storm forecast for Thursday (June 26), according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.

Total solar eclipses are rare, but exactly how rare is now up for debate after the European Space Agency debuted the first images today (June 16) from two new satellites that together operate as an "eclipse machine."

Total solar eclipses currently occur 14 times every 18 years and 11 days somewhere on Earth, which is one every 16 months, on average. According to NASA, they occur once every 366 years in any specific place.

Requiring neither lucky geography nor patience, the European Space Agency (ESA) Proba-3 mission, which launched on a PSLV-XL rocket from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Dec. 5, 2024, has just sent back its first images that are sure to impress eclipse chasers across the world. The mission is the first to see two satellites orbit in a "precision formation," with one acting as the moon to eclipse the sun in front of the other, which points a telescope at the sun to capture its elusive corona.

A decade in the making, these first images — from the mission's first successful formation flying demo on May 23 — are a glimpse of what's to come.

The sun's corona

The solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, is a mystery. The sun's photosphere, its surface, is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius), but the corona is two million degrees Fahrenheit (over 1,1 million degrees C) — about 200 times hotter. Scientists need to know why and how this is the case, mainly because the corona is where the solar wind is generated.

"As well as being an amazing thing to see, the corona is also a laboratory for plasma physics and the main source of space weather," said Andrei Zhukov, Principal Investigator for the Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun (ASPIICS) at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, speaking at the Solar Eclipse Conference in Leuven, Belgium.

Capturing a prominence

Observations of the corona are crucial to understanding phenomena such as solar wind and coronal mass ejections, which can disrupt Earth's power and communication systems and produce spectacular displays of the northern lights. However, Proba-3's images will also help solar physicists see features in the corona that are sometimes visible to observers of total solar eclipses. "Sometimes, clouds of relatively cold plasma are observed near the sun, creating what we call a prominence," said Zhukov. Prominences are much colder than the surrounding million-degree hot plasma in the corona, though still around 10,000 degrees Celsius. "We are very happy to have been able to capture one such structure in one of the first ASPIICS images," said Zhukov.

Coronagraphs in space

But there's a problem. The sun's disk is a million times brighter than the corona and completely overwhelms the human eye. The only time the corona can be seen is during a total solar eclipse. "They're inconvenient, they're rare and last only a few minutes," said Zhukov."The last total solar eclipse in Belgium was in 1406, and the next is in 2090. That's why we have coronagraphs."

A coronagraph is a device attached to a telescope that blocks out the direct light from a star — in this case, the sun — so that whatever is around it can be seen. Sometimes it's exoplanets. In this case, it's the corona. Unfortunately, Earth's atmosphere scatters that light. In short, they work much better in space. "Current coronagraphs are no match for Proba-3, which will observe the sun's corona down almost to the edge of the solar surface," says Jorge Amaya, Space Weather Modelling Coordinator at ESA. "So far, this was only possible during natural solar eclipses."

Proba-3's first images

In March, Proba-3's two spacecraft — the Coronagraph satellite and the Occulter satellite — aligned 500 feet (150 meters) apart with millimeter accuracy for several hours without ground intervention. The Occulter successfully blocked the sun's disk to cast a shadow onto ASPIICS — the coronagraph's sensitive optical instrument that captures the corona. "Having two spacecraft form one giant coronagraph in space allowed us to capture the inner corona with very low levels of stray light in our observations, exactly as we expected," said Damien Galano, Proba-3 mission manager. "I was absolutely thrilled to see the images, especially since we got them on the first try," said Zhukov. "It's just a teaser because we are still in the commissioning phase."

How Proba-3's images are created

The images themselves were processed by scientists and engineers at the ASPIICS Science Operations Centre at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. Each complete image — covering the area from the occulted sun to the edge of the field of view — is constructed from three images. "The difference between those is only the exposure time, which determines how long the coronagraph's aperture is exposed to light. Combining the three images gives us the full view of the corona," said Zhukov. "Our 'artificial eclipse' images are comparable with those taken during a natural eclipse — the difference is that we can create our eclipse once every 19.6-hour orbit."

Proba-3 will create about 1,000 hours of images of the corona over its two-year mission — and anyone will be able to download the data. "We have an open data policy — the uncalibrated data will be published immediately so everyone will be able to calibrate their own data," said Zhukov.

Proba-3's orbit

The solar-powered Proba-3 satellites have an elliptical orbit with a perigee (closest point) of 373 miles (600 kilometers) and an apogee of 37,000 miles (60,000 kilometers). They only fly in formation when close to apogee because that's when Earth's gravity, its magnetic field and atmospheric drag are at their weakest. That allows the satellites to use minimal propellant to attempt formation flying. The coronagraph satellite positions itself 492 feet (150 meters) behind the occulter satellite — two orders of magnitude farther than any other space-based coronagraph — with the formation flying performed down to a single millimeter in precision. The 4.4 feet (1.4 meters) occulter casts a 3.15 inch (8 centimeters) shadow onto the coronagraph. Remarkably, it's all done autonomously, with Proba standing for "Project for onboard autonomy".

"The precision achieved is extraordinary," said Dietmar Pilz, ESA Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality. "It validates our years of technological development and positions ESA at the forefront of formation flying missions."

The first artificial solar eclipse

Proba-3 is not unique. A joint mission between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975 saw the first coronal observation using formation flying, with the Apollo spacecraft acting as an improvised coronagraph, allowing the Soyuz crew to photograph the solar corona. "It was all done by hand — the image was taken through a window of a Soyuz spacecraft," said Zhukov. The results were disappointing, mainly because the thruster gases around the spacecraft scattered the light.

With Proba-3, the concept has become a reality, and artificial solar eclipses will be possible, revealing the inner solar corona without the need to wait for a total solar eclipse. Will that deter eclipse chasers? Absolutely not!

This article was originally published on Space.com.

Skywatchers in up to 18 U.S. states could witness auroras in the coming days as a "moderate" geomagnetic storm rocks Earth's magnetic field, starting on Friday (June 13).

On Wednesday (June 11), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center issued an initial alert for a G2 (moderate) geomagnetic storm starting on Saturday (June 14). On Friday, the center released an updated warning that the storm could begin later the same day. The space weather event is predicted to end on Sunday (June 15) or Monday (June 16).

The disturbance has the potential to rise to a G3 (strong) geomagnetic storm over the weekend, according to Spaceweather.com, but this is not guaranteed. Some other outlets have reported that the storm could reach G4 (severe) status. However, these reports have likely arisen from confusion surrounding a statement from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which was explaining what happened during a different G4 storm that occurred earlier this month, and the upcoming storm will not be anywhere near as intense.

Geomagnetic storms are disturbances to Earth's magnetic field, or magnetosphere, triggered by fluctuations in the solar wind. They are normally caused by giant clouds of magnetized particles from erupting solar flares, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). However, in this case, the disturbance is being caused by a co-rotating interaction region — turbulence in the solar wind caused by fast-moving streams colliding with slower wind ahead of them — that originated from a large "coronal hole" on the solar surface.

These disturbances can squeeze Earth's magnetosphere, potentially causing widespread aurora displays at unusually low latitudes. They can also cause temporary radio blackouts, damage power infrastructure on the ground and cause satellites to fall from the sky as Earth's atmosphere soaks up excess energy and expands. (Geomagnetic storms are classified using a scale that ranks their intensity from G1 (minor) to G5 (extreme) — which is very rare.)

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

The 18 states that could see auroras starting tonight are Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, South Dakota, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Wyoming, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

The aurora could also be seen in the U.K. and parts of Europe. However, there is no guarantee that you will see auroras if you live in these areas, as your view may be obscured by cloudy weather, haze from wildfires or light pollution.

Solar activity has been high in recent years thanks to solar maximum — the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year cycle of activity, when our home star's magnetic field completely flips. This phase began in early 2024, much earlier than initially predicted, and is likely now coming to a close. But solar activity could remain high for several years to come.

In May 2024, Earth experienced a G5 geomagnetic storm — the most powerful in 21 years, with some of the most widespread auroras in the last 500 years — after at least five different CMEs hit our planet in quick succession. This storm was so powerful that it caused tractors and other GPS-controlled machinery to dance from side to side across several U.S. states.

The National Science Foundation's (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the summit of Haleakalā on the island of Maui, Hawaii, captured the sharpest-ever images of the sun's surface.

The images show ultra-fine bright and dark stripes (called striations) in the thin, gaseous layer of the sun's atmosphere known as the photosphere, according to a statement from the National Solar Observatory (NSO), which operates the solar telescope.

"In this work, we investigate the fine-scale structure of the solar surface for the first time with an unprecedented spatial resolution of just about 20 kilometers [12.4 miles], or the length of Manhattan Island," David Kuridze, lead author of the study and a NSO scientists, said in the statement. "These striations are the fingerprints of fine-scale magnetic field variations."

The striations appear as alternating bright and dark stripes along the walls of solar granules — the convection cells that transport heat from the sun's interior to its surface. These patterns result from curtain-like magnetic fields that ripple and shift like fabric fluttering in the wind.

As light from the hot granule walls passes through these magnetic "curtains," variations in the magnetic field strength cause changes in brightness, effectively tracing the underlying magnetic structures. If the magnetic field is weaker than in its surroundings, it appears darker; if stronger, it glows brighter.

Therefore, the striations are believed to be signatures of subtle yet powerful magnetic fluctuations, which alter the density and opacity of the solar plasma. These slight shifts are only detectable thanks to the telescope’s Visible Broadband Imager (VBI), which operates in the G-band — a specific range of visible light that highlights areas with strong magnetic activity.

Unraveling the sun's magnetic architecture is key to understanding phenomena like solar flares, eruptions and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which drive space weather and can impact Earth.

The team's findings were published May 20 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

Just this once, it's OK to stare at the sun — provided you're looking at the European Space Agency's (ESA) newly released, history-making images of the solar south pole.

Taken near the sun on March 23 and revealed to Earthlings Wednesday (June 11), the new images from ESA's Solar Orbiter show a view of our star that no human or spacecraft has ever recorded before. While Earth and the other planets orbit relatively in line with the sun's equator on an invisible plane called the ecliptic, Solar Orbiter spent the last several months tilting its orbit to 17 degrees below the solar equator — bringing our star's enigmatic south pole into view for the first time ever.

"Today we reveal humankind's first-ever views of the Sun's pole," Carole Mundell, ESA's director of science, said in a statement. "These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science."

The new images capture the solar pole in a broad swath of visible and ultraviolet wavelengths, using three of Solar Orbiter's 10 onboard instruments. The result is a colorful confetti of solar data, including an unprecedented look at the perplexing tangles of the sun's magnetic field as it prepares to flip, and the high-velocity movements of specific chemical elements as they ride plumes of plasma that make up the solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles that governs space weather throughout our solar system.

These data will help improve our understanding of the solar wind, space weather and the sun's roughly 11-year activity cycle for years to come, according to ESA.

But of particular interest right now, as the sun spits out flares in overdrive during its period of peak activity (called solar maximum), are the magnetic measurements taken with Solar Orbiter's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) instrument.

Related: NASA spacecraft snaps eerie image of eclipsed sun with an extra moon overhead. What's going on?

PHI's maps of the solar magnetic field highlight an intriguing paradox: While most magnets have a distinct north and south pole, the sun's south pole is roiling with both north and south polarity magnetic fields (shown as blue and red patches in the corresponding images).

According to ESA, this mess of magnetism is a temporary phenomenon that hints that the sun's magnetic field is about to flip, as it does once every 11 years or so. This magnetic reversal signifies the end of the high-activity solar maximum and begins a transition toward the relative calm of the next solar minimum. When the next minimum begins, approximately five to six years from now, the sun's poles should show only one type of magnetic polarity apiece as our star takes a break from launching violent space weather tantrums.

Solar Orbiter will have several more chances to test these predictions over the coming years. With a little help from the gravitational pull of Venus, Solar Orbiter will continue tilting its orbit further from the solar equator, reaching a tilt of 24 degrees in December 2026 and a whopping 33 degrees in June 2029. These ever-more-angular vantage points will expose the solar poles in even greater detail, improving our knowledge of our home star with every flyby.

"This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's 'stairway to heaven'," Daniel Müller, ESA's Solar Orbiter project scientist, said in the statement. "These data will transform our understanding of the Sun's magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity."

Update: This article was updated at 9:30 a.m. ET on June 12 to alter the headline

Update: Summer officially begins tonight in North America! Read on to find out exactly when and why.

Each year on the summer solstice, revelers at Stonehenge in England stay up all night to celebrate the dawn of the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, with many images streamed live.

But this year, there's a twist: The summer solstice there will occur on a different day than the solstice in North America, due to time zone differences. So when is the summer solstice in 2025, and what's the science behind it?

This year, the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere occurs at 02:42 UTC on Saturday, June 21, 2025. That means it's at 10:42 p.m. EDT on Friday, June 20 and at 3:41 a.m. BST on Saturday, June 21.

The event’s name is instructive: "Sol" means "sun" in Latin, while "stice" means to stand still. That's exactly what appears to happen on two days each year — one between Dec. 20 and Dec. 22, and the other between June 20 and June 22 — when the sun rises and sets at its most northerly or southerly points on the horizon.

If you consider the seasons and the sun's position in the sky, that checks out: The sun reaches its highest point in the midday sky in the Northern Hemisphere on the day of the summer solstice, which means it must be rising at its farthest northeast and setting at its farthest northwest.

Precisely the opposite is happening in the Southern Hemisphere, where the June solstice is the winter solstice. When the sun is highest in the Northern Hemisphere's daytime sky, it's the lowest in the Southern Hemisphere's daytime sky. The situation is reversed for the December solstice, the longest day and the shortest night in the Southern Hemisphere. At the equinoxes ("equi" and "nox," meaning equal night), between March 19 and 21 and between Sept. 21 and 24, the sun appears to rise and set due east and west, respectively, from everywhere on Earth.

Related: The 10 best stargazing events of 2025

Solstices and equinoxes happen because Earth's axis of rotation is tilted 23.5 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the sun, which causes the seasons. On the summer solstice, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, so it receives the full glare of the sun's rays for the longest time and the day is therefore the longest.

Following this logic, it would seem that the summer solstice should also be the warmest day of the year. However, there's a slight seasonal lag because our mostly watery planet takes time to absorb the heat, according to the Royal Meteorological Society. At the North Pole, the sun does not set on the summer solstice, while at the South Pole, the sun does not rise.

Editor's note: This article was updated on June 20 to mark the beginning of the summer solstice in North America.

While making a death-defying dive through the sun’s atmosphere, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has directly recorded a powerful plasma explosion heading toward our star’s surface in unprecedented detail.

Parker's new measurements found protons with about 1000 times greater energy than expected and a plasma jet shooting toward the sun, not away from it. Parker was uniquely positioned between the sun and the particles’ source, allowing scientists to easily figure out where they came from. These findings indicate that the complexity and strength of tangles in the sun’s magnetic field can accelerate charged particles to much greater speeds than expected from the field’s strength alone.

The sunward plasma jet was caused by "magnetic reconnection" in the sun's atmosphere — the explosive process in which magnetic fields fracture and reconnect. The powerful phenomenon transforms energy stored in the sun's magnetic field into energy that accelerates the solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles that the sun blasts across the solar system.

Understanding magnetic reconnection is critical for making better predictions about space weather, which is driven by the solar wind and other energetic outbursts from our star. Space weather is a primary suspect for what stripped away Mars' atmosphere, turning it from a habitable planet into an icy desert wasteland. On Earth, space weather can trigger geomagnetic storms that cause blackouts, damage satellites, interfere with radio and GPS signals, and even put astronauts at risk. On the bright side, it also gives Earth its signature glorious auroras.

The sun's magnetic field is extremely powerful, complex and dynamic. Space weather predictions require complicated computer simulations based on equations that describe how magnetic fields behave — but the sun is so large and convoluted that these equations will always be approximations. To improve the models' accuracy, scientists must collect extremely detailed measurements of the sun. This is where the Parker Solar Probe comes in.

The Parker Solar Probe is the first mission to fly into the sun's upper atmosphere, called the corona. It has been directly measuring magnetic fields and particles in and around the corona in unprecedented detail, providing scientific insight into the heliosphere (the sun's atmosphere, which encompasses the entire solar system in a massive, elongated bubble).

Related: NASA's daredevil solar spacecraft survives 2nd close flyby of our sun

"These findings indicate that magnetic reconnection … is an important source of energetic particles in the near-Sun solar wind," lead study author Mihir Desai, director of the Southwest Research Institute's Department of Space Research, said in a statement. "Everywhere there are magnetic fields there will be magnetic reconnection. But the Sun's magnetic fields are much stronger near the star, so there's a lot more stored energy to be released."

Understanding the workings of magnetic reconnection events could help scientists better predict harmful space weather, the researchers said.

"Reports from the American Meteorological Society indicated that the powerful solar events in May 2024 wreaked havoc with farmers when extreme geomagnetic storms disrupted the precise GPS-guided navigation systems used to plant, fertilize and harvest rows of seeds, causing an estimated loss of up to $500 million in earning potential," Desai said. "Parker's access to this new data is critical, particularly as we remain in the midst of a very active solar cycle."

The latest measurements of magnetic reconnection, reported in a paper published May 29 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, are one of many new discoveries Parker has made. In 2023, over 700 peer-reviewed scientific papers were published using data collected in the probe's first four years of operation, and there are still many more discoveries to be made. The spacecraft completed its second ultra-close flyby of the sun on March 22, zooming within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface — matching its own record from December 2024.

The sun is the star at the center of our solar system. It's the largest, brightest and most massive object in the solar system, and it provides the light and heat that life on Earth depends on. Powered by a process called nuclear fusion, the sun can get hotter than 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). The sun has been around for over 4 billion years, but one day, it will run out of fuel. Read on to learn more about what our local star is made of, how it formed and what will happen when it dies.

5 fast facts about the sun

• Over 1 million Earths could fit inside the sun.
• The sun may look yellow from Earth, but it actually releases every color of light, meaning its true color is white.
• The sun is unique in that it's the only star in our solar system. Up to 85% of stars have at least one companion star.
• The sun contains over 99% of the mass of our entire solar system.
• Like Earth, the sun also rotates on its axis. Each rotation takes about 27 Earth days.

Everything you need to know about the sun

The sun pictures

Discover more about the sun

• Is Earth getting closer to the sun, or farther away?
• Where on Earth does the sun rise first?
• What color is the sun?

Editor's note: This story was updated on March 18, 2026 to include the most recent estimate of the sun's age.

Incredible new images of the sun's surface provide an unprecedented view of raging sunspots and solar activity.

A new high-resolution camera system developed by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) for the Vacuum Tower Telescope (VTT), located at the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife, reconstructed views of the sun with an 8K image resolution for the first time, according to a statement from AIP.

Solar observations often face a trade-off between field of view and resolution. Large solar telescopes provide high-resolution images but cover limited areas, while smaller instruments can monitor the entire solar disk but lack fine detail. However, the VTT offers both a wide field of view and commendable spatial resolution. The integration of the new camera system enhances this capability, allowing for comprehensive and detailed studies of active solar regions.

"In order to better understand solar activity, it is crucial not only to analyze the fundamental processes of the fine structure and the long-term development of global activity with various instruments, but also to investigate the temporal evolution of the magnetic field in active regions," Rolf Schlichenmaier, a scientist at the Institute for Solar Physics (KIS) in Freiburg, which operates the VTT, said in the statement.

The new camera system employs advanced image restoration techniques, compiling 100 short-exposure images — each with a resolution of 8000x6000 pixels — captured at 25 frames per second. This process yields reconstructed images with 8K resolution, effectively mitigating disturbances caused by Earth's atmosphere and achieving a spatial resolution of approximately 62 miles (100 kilometers) on the sun's surface.

Such precision enables the observation of dynamic solar processes on timescales as short as 20 seconds, according to the statement.

Using this technology, researchers have obtained high-resolution images covering areas up to 124,274 miles (200,000 km) in diameter, which is approximately one-seventh of the sun's diameter.

In turn, the images reveal intricate details of sunspot groups, plasma flows and magnetic field structures that trigger solar flares. This not only enhances our understanding of complex solar dynamics, but lends insight for improved space weather forecasting.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

Solar "raindrops" — plasma streams and vast arches extending outward from the sun's surface and into the corona, the outermost part of the solar atmosphere — have been captured in spectacular new detail by a ground-based telescope in California.

Among the images taken from time-lapse movies, which utilize new technology to eliminate blurring caused by Earth's atmosphere, is coronal rain, a phenomenon that occurs when cooling plasma condenses and falls back toward the sun's surface along magnetic field lines.

Other features imaged include prominences — the term solar physicists use to describe the arches and loops — and finely structured plasma streams. The images are artificially colorized from the hydrogen-alpha light captured by the telescope, making them appear pink.

The remarkable images, taken by researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation's National Solar Observatory and New Jersey Institute of Technology, were published this week in a paper in the journal Nature.

"These are by far the most detailed observations of this kind, showing features not previously observed, and it's not quite clear what they are," Vasyl Yurchyshyn, co-author of the study and a research professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, said in a statement.

The researchers captured the new images using the 1.6-meter Goode Solar Telescope at the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) in California, equipped with a new technology called Cona, which employs a laser to correct for turbulence in Earth's upper atmosphere.

Related: NASA spacecraft snaps eerie image of eclipsed sun with an extra moon overhead. What's going on?

Cona is "like a pumped-up autofocus" for the sky, Nicolas Gorceix, chief observer at BBSO, said in the statement. It's a form of adaptive optics that works by measuring, and then adapting in real-time to, atmospheric distortions, reshaping a special mirror 2,200 times per second.

Turbulence in Earth's upper atmosphere has always been a limiting factor when studying the sun, but Cona increases the resolution of what can be observed, from features over 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) wide to just 63 km (39 miles).

The sun's corona, which means crown, is one of the most mysterious places in the solar system. This outer layer of the sun's atmosphere is blocked from view by the brighter photosphere — the sun's surface — and is only visible briefly to the naked eye during a total solar eclipse. That also applies to prominences, which can be seen during totality as reddish-pink arches and loops.

Despite its tenuous nature, the corona is millions of degrees hotter than the photosphere. It's of critical interest to solar scientists because it's in the corona that the solar wind originates. This constant stream of charged particles then radiates throughout the solar system, interacting with planetary atmospheres (including Earth's) to cause geomagnetic storms and auroras.

Following the successful test of Cona, plans are underway to install it on the 4-meter Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Maui, Hawaii, the world's largest solar telescope.

A massive, "geriatric" sunspot is currently making its third trip across the sun's Earth-facing surface, around two months after it first appeared. The senior citizen has lasted far longer than most other solar blemishes and looks like it might persist for a while longer, potentially breaking a centuries-old sunspot longevity record.

The giant dark patch, currently named AR 14100, is located on the sun's northern hemisphere, just above the solar equator. It first emerged on April 5, when it was dubbed AR 14055, before disappearing from view as it rotated onto the sun's far side. It then reappeared on April 28, and was renamed AR 14079, before disappearing from view once again and reemerging on Monday (May 26) with a new name. (Sunspots get a new name every time they reappear on the sun's near-side to help researchers better track their space weather potential.)

The hefty spot has fluctuated in size as it's spun around our home star. It reached its maximum size in early May (when it was labeled AR 14079), spanning 87,000 miles (140,000 kilometers) across — roughly the equivalent of 11 times Earth's diameter. This made it the largest sunspot of 2025 so far, but it is now around half the size.

Most sunspots last only around a week, while some of the larger ones can sometimes survive long enough to reappear after transiting the sun's far side, which takes approximately two weeks. But it is rare for the dark patches to live any longer, even when they are this large. To compare it to human lifespans, AR 14100 is most definitely a "senior citizen," according to Spaceweather.com.

"Contact the AARP [formerly the American Association of Retired Persons]," Spaceweather.com representatives wrote. "Sunspot 14100 wants to join."

Related: 10 supercharged solar storms that blew us away in 2024

It is hard to tell what the record for the longest-lived sunspot is because historical data is far less accurate than what researchers currently collect using advanced spacecraft. For example, astronomers previously believed that a sunspot had persisted for 18 months between 1840 and 1841. However, a century later, scientists showed that this was actually multiple different sunspots appearing in the same place.

Instead, the longest lasting sunspot on record is most likely a dark patch from 1919, which lasted for 134 days (or more than four months), according to Spaceweather.com.

Although AR 14100 is smaller than it was two weeks ago, it shows no signs of disappearing completely, and has unleashed several solar flares since reemerging. But it would need to survive for another two or three months to break the longevity record. "It might," Spaceweather.com representatives wrote. "The sunspot is remarkably stable."

"I'm curious to see how long the sunspot will be with us," amateur astronomer Harald Paleske, who has photographed the sunspot multiple times from near his home in Germany, told Spaceweather.com. "This is its third run across the sun."

Sunspot mania

Sunspots appear when parts of the sun's magnetic field break through the solar surface. This makes them cooler than their surroundings, making them appear very dark via an optical illusion, even though they are only slightly dimmer than the rest of the sun.

We are currently in the midst of the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year cycle of activity, known as solar maximum, which began in early 2024 and is likely now coming toward an end. During this period, the number of sunspots also peaks as the sun's magnetic field becomes increasingly chaotic and disorganized before eventually flipping entirely.

The current cycle has been much more active than initially expected, and in August 2024, the average number of daily sunspots reached its highest monthly value in 23 years, peaking at 337 individual spots in a single day.

Scientists have seen several other massive sunspots during the current cycle, including one that was up to 15 times wider than Earth and a "sunspot archipelago" that was about the same size. These giant spots tend to emerge very quickly, swelling up to their full width in just a couple of days.

But while giant sunspots can spit out powerful solar storms capable of disrupting , such as the great Halloween solar storms of 2003, their size is no guarantee that they will be dangerous. Instead, it is their magnetic configuration that determines how likely they are to impact our planet.

Luckily, new technologies, such as the recently completed Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, which recently captured the clearest-ever image of a sunspot, are helping researchers predict which spots will be most dangerous. Scientists are also using NASA's Mars rovers to spy on giant sunspots when they are pointed away from Earth.

Though we have seen some sizable dark patches sweeping across the sun in recent years, they pale in comparison to historic giants, including a whopping spot that covered up to 14% of the solar disk and spat out the Carrington Event — the most powerful solar storm ever witnessed by humans — in 1859.

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

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.

The moon hovers over a shadowy void wreathed in sunlight in a stunning new photo taken by NASA's Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission on April 27.

PUNCH is a collection of four small satellites orbiting Earth with their instruments aimed at the sun. Launched on March 11, its goal is to study the solar wind — the stream of charged particles emanating from the sun and the cause of space weather. It will do so by taking pictures of the sun and the space between it and Earth.

To prepare for its science operations phase, PUNCH must go through commissioning — a phase of instrument testing and alignment. The image above was taken as part of the commissioning process. The dark, circular shadow is from the "occulter." The occulter is needed to prevent the sun's light from overwhelming the images, just like the moon blocks out the sun during a solar eclipse, revealing the delicate streamers and filaments that stretch from the sun's surface into the corona, the sun's outermost atmosphere.

The golden glow surrounding the sun is light reflecting off the occulter, and the dark areas at the top of the image are outside the instrument's field of view. The moon is illuminated by light reflected off Earth. Images collected during the mission's science operations will undergo more processing to remove the stray light and some small distortions left by contamination to reveal detailed images of the sun's corona.

Related: The sun just spat out the strongest solar flares of 2025 — and more could be headed toward Earth

Photos of the sun's corona can help scientists study the solar wind — the more than 300,000 tons (272,000 metric tons) of material the sun blasts into space every second at a million mph (1.6 million km/h), bathing the entire solar system in a feisty stew of charged particles. The solar wind is responsible for geomagnetic storms that, on Earth, can cause power grid failures and radio blackouts, and disrupt or damage satellites. Understanding the solar wind helps us prepare for geomagnetic storms so life on Earth can continue without disruption.

The photos PUNCH will take won't directly show the sun's volatile magnetic field. Instead, they'll show massive, glowing plasma loops and outbursts that are shaped by it. Patterns in the streamers and filaments emanating from the sun help researchers map out regions that are connected to the extreme space weather that causes geomagnetic storms on Earth. When combined with data collected within the sun's corona by the Parker Solar Probe (PSP), PUNCH's science will enable a much deeper understanding of the processes that drive the solar wind. This knowledge, in turn, can help protect the planet from geomagnetic storms.

"PSP and PUNCH are both working to unite two separate branches of heliophysics into a unified whole," PUNCH's principal investigator, Craig DeForest, told Live Science in an email. "PSP is carrying the techniques of space physics (in-situ sampling) inward to touch and measure the solar corona. PUNCH is extending the techniques of solar physics (scientific imaging) outward to measure how the solar corona touches us. The two missions complement each other beautifully."

PUNCH is scheduled to complete its commissioning phase June 9 and will start collecting new images of the sun and the area around it continuously. The data collected will be available to anyone who wishes to access it as part of PUNCH's commitment to open, inclusive science.

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?

Weather on Earth can be wild, but it's not the only kind of weather we have to deal with. Space weather — all the winds and particles streaming off the sun — can have major impacts on Earth and human infrastructure. In the worst cases, this can mean dangerous disruption to our power grids and communications satellites.

To help us predict these space storms, astronomers have a newly improved space weatherman — and it's the best one to date. The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), perched atop the Hawaiian mountain of Haleakalā, is the world's largest telescope used for studying the sun and predicting these storms.

The team behind this technological marvel recently hit a major milestone, finally turning on one of DKIST's most powerful cameras — known as the Visible Tunable Filter, or VTF — after more than a decade working on its creation.

This camera is the final piece of the puzzle for DKIST, and the VTF's addition "will complete its initial arsenal of scientific instruments," Carrie Black, director of the National Solar Observatory, said in a statement.

"The significance of the technological achievement is such that one could easily argue the VTF is the Inouye Solar Telescope's heart, and it is finally beating at its forever place," Matthias Schubert, project scientist for the VTF, said in the statement.

VTF's first image shows a major clump of sunspots, dark blobs on the sun's surface caused by its intense magnetic field, each blob measuring wider than the continental United States. This impressive camera can see details down to a resolution of about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) per pixel on the solar surface — an absolutely wild resolution given that the sun is tens of millions of miles away from us.

Related: A mysterious, 100-year solar cycle may have just restarted — and it could mean decades of dangerous space weather

VTF provides more than just a simple snapshot. It captures images at multiple wavelengths of light to measure a spectrum, while also gathering information on how the light's electric field is oriented (known as polarization). These extra perspectives on the sun help reveal details of the solar surface, magnetic field and plasma that are otherwise invisible, informing our predictions for space weather and solar flares.

During just one observation of the sun, this instrument can collect more than 10 million spectra — graphs of the light's intensity over different wavelengths — which help scientists determine how hot the solar atmosphere is, how strong the sun's magnetic field is and more.

Today's news is only the beginning for the VTF and DKIST. The incredibly complex instrument still requires more testing and set-up, which is expected to be completed by next year.

But the newly released first images show great promise for how much we can learn about the sun, our nearest star. These images are "something no other instrument in the telescope can achieve in the same way," said National Solar Observatory optical engineer Stacey Sueoka. "I'm excited to see what's possible as we complete the system."

The unexpected surge of solar activity during the ongoing solar maximum may be tied to a lesser-known, 100-year-long cycle that is just beginning to ramp up again, a new study suggests.

If that's true, the next few decades could see further increases in solar activity that may threaten Earth-orbiting spacecraft and continue to trigger vibrant auroras across the globe. However, other experts are skeptical of the new findings.

Solar activity naturally waxes and wanes throughout the solar cycle — a roughly 11-year period in which our home star goes from being mostly calm in a phase called solar minimum to being a chaotic mass that frequently spits out powerful solar storms at solar maximum, and back again. This cycle is also known as the "sunspot cycle" because the number of dark patches on the sun rises and falls due to changes in the sun's magnetic field, which completely flips during solar maximum.

However, there are several other cycles that dictate solar activity. One example is the Hale cycle, which governs how individual magnetic bands move across the sun's surface and has recently been shown to influence the progression of the sunspot cycle. Historical records also show that the sun has experienced several long-term fluctuations in solar activity over the past few millennia. These included the Maunder Minimum — a period of greatly reduced solar activity between 1645 and 1715.

Another, lesser-known repeating pattern in solar activity is the Centennial Gleissberg Cycle (CGC) — a variation in the intensity of sunspot cycles that rises and falls every 80 to 100 years. The CGC is still poorly understood, but it is likely tied to "subtle sloshing" of the magnetic fields in each of the sun's two hemispheres that slightly alters the Hale cycle, Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist at the newly formed space weather solutions company Lynker Space, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

Related: 10 supercharged solar storms that blew us away in 2024

In the new study, published March 2 in the journal Space Weather, researchers suggest that the CGC might have just "turned over," or started again. This could also explain why the ongoing solar maximum, which officially began in early 2024, has ended up being much harder to predict than initially expected.

The study team came to this conclusion after analyzing changes to the "proton flux," or number of positively charged particles, in Earth's inner radiation belt — the first of two doughnut-shaped bands of charged particles surrounding our planet. Collectively, these bands are known as the Van Allen belts.

The inner belt's proton flux decreases when solar activity increases because of interactions with Earth's upper atmosphere, which swells as it soaks up more solar radiation. On the flip side, the proton flux increases as solar activity decreases.

The new analysis shows that the flux increased over the past 20 years but has just started decreasing over the past year or so. This suggests that we have "just passed the CGC minimum" and that average solar activity will start to rise again, study lead author Kalvyn Adams, an undergraduate researcher at JILA, a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, told Live Science.

The proton flux data were collected by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites as they passed through the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) — a mysterious dent in Earth's magnetic field above South America and the South Atlantic Ocean where our planet's protective shield is the weakest. This was a key reason these trends became apparent, the researchers said.

"The SAA is a region where the Earth's magnetic field is weak and allows trapped protons to reach lower altitudes," Adams said. This allows the NOAA spacecraft to "see into" the inner radiation belt without having to fly directly into it, which would be extremely tricky, he added.

Surprising solar activity

We may be nearing the end of the maximum phase of the current sunspot cycle, Solar Cycle 25 (SC25). This peak has been very active and has included some extreme space weather events, such as a supercharged geomagnetic storm in May 2024 that triggered some of the most widespread auroras in the past 500 years. However, this flourish of activity was not initially expected.

During the previous sunspot cycle, SC24, the sun was surprisingly quiet throughout solar maximum. This led space weather experts from NASA and NOAA to initially forecast that the same would happen during SC25, which they later admitted was a mistake.

The new research hints that SC24's lull was caused by the CGC minimum, likely making it the quietest sunspot cycle for around a century. If this is the case, then the unexpected activity of the current solar maximum means the sun is returning to "business as usual," McIntosh said.

Previous research had already suggested that the CGC may have played a role in the recent sunspot cycle confusion, including a 2023 study from members of Adam's research group and a 2024 paper that analyzed sunspot patterns with machine learning. However, the most recent findings are the first to suggest that the CGC minimum may be over.

The new study also suggests that the CGC may have a greater influence on the sunspot cycle than researchers previously realized, Adams said. As a result, solar cycle forecasters should "definitely" keep a closer eye on this phenomenon when predicting upcoming cycles, he added.

More to come?

If the CGC is turning over, then upcoming sunspot cycles will likely be as active as the current cycle and could eventually get stronger as we approach the CGC maximum, the researchers wrote.

"We just passed the CGC minimum, and it will be another 40 to 50 years before the CGC maximum," Adams told Live Science. "As a result, the next CGC maximum will likely occur around Solar Cycle 28."

Using "back-of-the-envelope calculations," we can assume that when this happens, solar activity could be around twice as high as it has been during the current maximum, Adams added. However, it is hard to tell for sure, because the CGC's effect on solar activity "can be a little inconsistent," he admitted.

Related: 15 dazzling images of the sun

If future solar maxima are more active than the ongoing peak, it could spell trouble for satellites, which can be knocked out of orbit as Earth's upper atmosphere swells. Several spacecraft have already fallen foul of this in the past few years. However, the problem could get worse in the coming decades due to the rapid expansion of private satellite "megaconstellations" that may be ill-equipped to deal with radiation spikes.

"Most [private] satellites usually take into account a model of the space climate when they are being made," Adams said. But they "are not considering the long-term variations that we are seeing."

Increased solar activity could also be a problem for astronauts, who are vulnerable to harmful radiation shooting out of our home star, Adams added. And there will likely be lots more people in space in the coming decades due to upcoming missions to the moon and Mars, as well as an increase in private spaceflight.

An uncertain future

But not everyone completely agrees with the new findings.

McIntosh, who was one of the first researchers to correctly forecast SC25 when he previously worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at CU Boulder, told Live Science that it is "too early" to make any firm conclusions about the CGC.

The main issue is that proton flux has only gone down over the past year, so it could just be a temporary dip caused by the natural variability of the sun, McIntosh said. As a result, the study team probably needs a couple more years of data for their results "to be definitive," he added.

There's also no baseline data for comparing CGC cycles, since satellites have only been able to accurately track proton flux over the past 30 to 40 years.

McIntosh also warned that the new study could be overestimating the effects of the CGC on the sunspot cycle, because we still don't know how the two cycles interact. At present, researchers are also struggling to agree on what the CGC is and how we define it, he added.

However, while McIntosh does not entirely agree with the new study, he did say it is "intriguing" and "well intentioned," and that the findings could help forecast the next sunspot cycle. While the CGC remains mysterious, it is likely "an intrinsic part of the [sunspot cycle] puzzle," he added.

A rare double solar eruption fueled a spectacular display of the northern lights overnight — and more auroras could be on the way.

Last weekend, two separate solar eruptions sent a pair of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — clouds of solar plasma and radiation — hurtling towards Earth. At least one of the CMEs hit our planet's magnetic field at around 1 p.m. EDT on Tuesday (April 15), creating geomagnetic storms and northern lights at high altitudes.

Skywatchers from across the Northern Hemisphere have shared images of last night's display. Spaceweather.com's real-time image gallery revealed that parts of Iceland, Sweden, Finland and the U.K. were treated to spectacular auroras. Northern lights were also expected across the northern U.S. and Canada, with the gallery confirming a display in Minnesota.

The storms could intensify if a second CME hits today (April 16). However, there's a good chance that the prime storm window has already closed. The CME that hit yesterday likely absorbed the second CME, so we probably won't get two blasts, the U.K.'s Met Office reported.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center still has a strong, G3 geomagnetic storm watch in place for today. However, the Center's latest three-day forecast suggests that the most severe G3 conditions occurred overnight — the geomagnetic storm scale ranges from G1 to G5, with G5 being the most severe.

The Space Weather Prediction Center still expects the aurora borealis to be visible over North America again tonight. The most intense auroras will be over Alaska and Canada, but states in the north of the contiguous U.S. may see auroras on the northern horizon.

Related: How to photograph the northern lights

This week's increased geomagnetic activity began with two eruptions on the sun. Solar eruptions stem from magnetic filaments — tubes of dense plasma. The filaments are normally held above the sun's surface by magnetic forces, but the structures can erupt if the magnetic forces become unstable. On April 12 and 13, there was a rare double eruption, with two filaments becoming unstable in quick succession, Spaceweather.com reported.

These eruptions sent streams of charged particles, carried on solar wind, out into space — and toward our planet. If they reach Earth's magnetic field, they can cause solar storms. Solar storms are major disturbances in Earth's magnetosphere, which is the region around our planet where Earth's magnetic field is the dominant magnetic field, as opposed to the magnetic field of interplanetary space, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.

The auroras form when the sun's charged particles travel through Earth's magnetosphere and hit the high atmosphere, smashing into particles of oxygen and nitrogen. These particles then glow different colors as they shed energy from the collision, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The exact timing of CMEs hitting Earth — and the resulting geomagnetic storms — is difficult to predict, with yesterday's CME arriving earlier than expected, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. The Met Office noted that its own G3 watch is valid until 2 p.m. EDT today, with the potential for minor G1 storms to continue through Thursday (April 17).

We know that the sun has entered its peak phase of activity, called solar maximum. But are we still in it, or is solar maximum already behind us? Let's see what the data has to say.

Although we cannot see it with our bare human eyes, the sun is highly dynamic. On the sun's surface, regions of concentrated magnetic fields manifest themselves as dark sunspots. Above sunspots, active regions in the sun's atmosphere produce solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), both of which can influence Earth via space weather.

However, the frequency of sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections is not constant. Instead, it rises and falls throughout an 11-year solar cycle. At the bottom of this solar cycle, called solar minimum, months can pass without a single sunspot. At the peak of the cycle — called solar maximum — sunspots, flares and CMEs are commonplace.

We have tracked solar cycles for hundreds of years by counting the number of sunspots on the sun. Since December 2019, at the solar minimum marking the end of Solar Cycle 24, we have been in Solar Cycle 25. Cycles typically last around 11 years, but the exact duration between subsequent solar minimums varies from cycle to cycle.

Related: NASA's daredevil solar spacecraft survives 2nd close flyby of our sun

At the start of Solar Cycle 25, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center published its official solar cycle prediction, based on an average of predictions from the scientific community. The prediction anticipated that a solar maximum peak of 101.8 to 125.2 monthly sunspots would occur close to July 2025.

However, Solar Cycle 25 has already exceeded the predicted peak, reaching a 13-month smoothed monthly value of 156.7 in August 2024. The 13-month smoothed value of a given month is determined by the average of the specific month, with six months on each side of it (reaching 13 months total). Therefore, there is a six-month lag until this value is available, with August 2024 being the most recent data point as of March 2025.

This smoothed value will likely continue to rise, but it also depends on the sunspot totals in the coming months. It is the peak of this 13-month smoothed curve — not the highest individual month — that determines the peak of the solar cycle.

The graph above displays the solar cycle evolution from 2010 to present. The black line shows monthly sunspot values, and the purple represents the smoothed average. From this graph, we can see that Solar Cycle 25 (from 2019 to present) has already exceeded the size of Solar Cycle 24.

The largest individual sunspot month of the cycle so far, August 2024, had a sunspot total of 216. Since then, monthly totals have been much lower, ranging from 136 to 166 between September 2024 and March 2025. Is this a sign that solar maximum has already passed? Maybe, but maybe not.

The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center has an experimental solar cycle prediction graph that's currently publicly available in its online testbed. This experimental prediction is a rolling one; it updates each month as the most recent month of data becomes available. Because it is made using up-to-date data, and not a prediction from before any solar cycle data was available, it is far more accurate than the 2019 prediction — and perhaps the most accurate predictor we have for the remainder of the solar cycle.

The most recent version of this prediction, which was updated in March 2025, is presented below. Per this current prediction, solar maximum has most likely already passed, with a peak between August and November 2024. If this is true, then we could already be in the declining phase of Solar Cycle 25.

This solar maximum date is very different from the original prediction of July 2025. So how can this be? Not all solar cycles are exactly 11 years in length. In general, the larger the solar cycle, the shorter it is. Because the amplitude of our current cycle has already far exceeded the predicted peak, it is therefore likely that the true solar maximum date will also precede the original prediction.

So is that it, then? Has solar maximum already come and gone? Perhaps not. Looking back to the first solar cycle graph shown in this article, we see that Solar Cycle 24 had two peaks — one in 2012, and a second in 2014. This double peak rarely features in predictions, but it has been observed many times across historic solar cycles. Could Solar Cycle 25 exhibit a second peak, delaying solar maximum until later in 2025? It is certainly possible, although some may argue that we've already experienced two peaks, in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

These peaks are not as clearly separated as in previous solar cycles, but they do produce a clear inflection in the smoothed solar cycle curve. Ultimately, we will have to wait another year or so to know when the true peak of the solar cycle occurred.

Even if the specific monthly peak of the cycle has passed, it doesn't mean solar activity is over. Strong solar activity persists for a year or two beyond the maximum date, so we still have some time to enjoy sunspots, coronal mass ejections, and any geomagnetic storms and aurora shows associated with them.

Originally posted on Space.com.

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