Sun fires off 3 huge flares, including strongest in a decade

The sun is having quite a week.

Our nearest star has shot out three powerful solar flares in the past two days, sending bursts of hot plasma into the solar system, on a possible collision course with Earth's magnetic field.

The most extreme of those flares -- a class X9.3 flare -- was the most powerful flare we've seen in more than 10 years.

An X2.2 flare shot out just before the X9 flare on Wednesday, and an X1.3 flare shot forth from the star on Thursday.

"This is a decade-class flare. A list of the most powerful solar flares recorded since 1976 ranks today's flare at number 14, tied with a similar explosion in 1990," wrote Tony Phillips, who runs spaceweather.com, on Thursday. "However, compared to the iconic Carrington Event of 1859, or even the more recent Halloween storms of 2003, this event is relatively mild."

Via Giphy

The active sunspot region producing these flares is also responsible for another, less powerful, M-class flare produced on Thursday.

The region has shot out five relatively large flares since Sept. 4, according to NASA.

"X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength," NASA wrote in a statement. "An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc. M-class flares are a tenth the size of X-class flares."

Scientists can track these sunspot regions, but don't yet have the ability to predict these flares.

"The details of solar flares remain somewhat elusive in the sense that we still can't predict when they'll happen, but we can at least tell when a sunspot has a particular magnetic field configuration that can harbor powerful solar flares," astrophysicist Karl Battams said.

"So this one happened to have the right ingredients."

If you want to check out the active sunspot for yourself, use your leftover solar eclipse glasses (assuming they aren't bent or damaged in any way) to take a look at the sun this week. The spots look like dark splotches on the face of the star.

What's the deal with the flares?

The flares this week don't necessarily mean that you should run for your tinfoil hats, but they can do some pretty wild things to Earth, satellites, and people orbiting our planet.

First of all, the flares have coronal mass ejections -- bursts of hot plasma -- associated with them.

That means that these charged particles can slam into Earth's magnetic field, supercharging auroras when they interact with neutral particles in the planet's upper atmosphere.

Usually the oval of the aurora stays close to the poles, where charged particles are dragged down along magnetic field lines. But during particularly strong solar storms, the oval can move lower, as the magnetic field is buffeted by the plasma, and more particles make it into the upper atmosphere.

In other words, people who don't usually see auroras might get a chance to see the dancing curtains of light thanks to the powerful flares this week.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWCP) has put out a "strong" geomagnetic storm watch from Friday through Saturday due to the arrival of the coronal mass ejection associated with the X9.3 flare.

"Analysis indicates likely CME [coronal mass ejection] arrival late on 8 September into early 9 September," the SWPC wrote in an update.

The arrival of the coronal mass ejection could push the oval of the aurora down into the Midwest, making the northern lights visible for people along a wide swath of the United States.

The SWPC is able to track the plasma through the solar system using a number of sun-staring satellites that keep an eye on the star and how its wild ways might affect our planet.

Solar storms can make satellites and power grids on Earth go a little wonky.

That said, Phillips doesn't think that these solar storms will pose too much of a problem for modern systems on our planet.

"Modern power grids, telecommunications, and other sun sensitive technologies should weather the storm with little difficulty," he wrote.

It's somewhat unusual that the sun is producing powerful X-flares these days. The star is on the downslope of its 11 year solar cycle, nearing its minimum of activity.

That said, according to Battams, for some reason powerful flares seem to spark later in the solar cycle, but scientists still aren't sure of the mechanism behind that.