NASA has captured a powerful X2.2 solar flare that erupted from the sun on Feb. 17, causing temporary blackouts in some parts of the world. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which constantly watches the sun, observed the flare—which is an intense eruption of electromagnetic radiation in the sun’s atmosphere—and said it peaked at 3:16 p.m. EST. “This flare is classified…

A team of scientists at the University of Queensland in Australia have turned to trees in an effort to discover more about mysterious and potentially devastating radioactive space storms that have hit earth several times over the past 10,000 years. The team of researchers included an undergraduate student and was led by Benjamin Pope from the University of…

Something is happening to the sun. One of the regions of the solar atmosphere currently exhibiting sunspots caught the attention of observatories on July 11, when there was a sudden increase in ultraviolet and X-ray brightness. The next ones to notice were the amateur radio communities on either side of the Pacific Ocean, when their…

A fast-growing giant sunspot that can emit solar flares has more than doubled in size in recent days and is currently facing Earth, according to experts. Sunspots are dark areas of strong magnetic fields on the sun’s surface. They appear dark because they are much colder than other parts of the sun’s surface, having formed at areas…

The sun produced a huge solar flare over the Easter holiday weekend, triggering radio blackouts over southeast Asia and Australia, experts said. The Easter solar eruption peaked at 11:34 p.m. EDT on Sunday (0334 GMT on April 17), according to the United States Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), and was followed shortly after by a coronal mass…

No wonder ancient cultures once worshipped the sun as a god. It is the giver of all life on Earth upon which our existence depends. But while the Greeks once portrayed our closest star as the charioteer Apollo, arcing across the sky, pulled by winged horses, today high-powered telescopes orbiting in the stratosphere capture the…

A large coronal mass ejection (CME) is expected to collide with the Earth’s magnetic field on Oct. 30 following an incredible solar flare eruption on Thursday. The sun unleashed an X1-class solar flare, its most powerful kind of flare, on Thursday. It peaked at 11:35 a.m.EDT (1535 GMT), according to an alert from the Space Weather Prediction Center…