On the evening of February 23, a powerful X-class flare occurred on the Sun. Hard radiation from it affected the area over the Pacific Ocean. A coronal mass ejection also resulted, but the Earth is not threatened.
Flare on the Sun
February 23 at 19:27 UTC, the GOES-19 satellite recorded a flare on the Sun. Its power was rated X2.0, which is among the most powerful. It occurred over sunspot group 4001, which was just approaching the northwestern edge of the solar disk.
The flare produced a large amount of ultraviolet radiation that reached the Earth’s surface and caused radio communications over the Pacific Ocean to disappear briefly. But the coronal mass ejection, capable of causing a powerful magnetic storm in a few days, is not threatening our planet yet.
A significant chunk of the Sun has separated from our luminary in an explosion. However, since the group of spots, in the vicinity of which the event occurred, was at the very edge of the visible disk, it did not fly towards our planet.
Long pause
In fact, the most interesting thing about the current flare is that it occurred 53 Earth days after the previous X-class flare. It was observed over region 3947 on January 4 and reached a magnitude of X1.8. Of course, there were a bunch of much smaller events in between.
But such a long gap does look strange. After all, we are now at the maximum of the solar cycle, which is also much more intense than the previous ones. It is quite possible that there is something we don’t know about the behavior of our luminary.
According to www.spaceweatherlive.com, www.spaceweather.com
