Scientists watching the James Webb telescope last week spotted a piece of the sun ‘appeared to fall off’.
A large tentacle of plasma snapped off from the sun, which reportedly created a “polar vortex" near the North Pole. The entire detachment took approximately eight hours.
In the past few weeks, X1-class solar flares have erupted from sunspots, sending pulses of x-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation travelling at light-speed, some of it in the direction of Earth.
According to NASA, solar flares are enormous explosions on the surface of the sun that occur when a build-up of magnetic energy in the sun’s atmosphere is suddenly released.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) solar flare rating system is based on five lettered classes, each of which is 10 times more powerful than the one before.
Disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic slowly, arriving in field that occur when highly charged
hours or davs particles travelling the sun’s magnetic field lines collide with the Earth are called Geomagnetic Storms.
Geomagnetic storms often cause stunning aurora displays in our sky and can interfere with Earth’s satellites.
A solar storm known as the ‘Carrington event’ disrupted telegraph systems, with telegraph operators reporting they were able to send messages even when they disconnected the machines’ batteries.
Space weather events caused transformers to fail, prompting a nine-hour blackout affecting more than 6 million people in Quebec, Canada.
Earth had a “perilous" close shave with an “extreme" solar storm in 2012. The storm, believed to be the most powerful solar event in up to 150 years, missed the Earth by about a week. NASA scientists said that if Earth had been hit, the event could have knocked our technology back at least 150 years.
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