The Sun Emits a Mid-level Flare and CME
Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours.
This flare is classified as an M6.5 flare, some ten times less powerful than the strongest flares, which are labeled X-class flares. M-class flares are the weakest flares that can still cause some space weather effects near Earth. This flare produced a radio blackout that has since subsided. The blackout was categorized as an R2 on a scale between R1 and R5 on NOAA's space weather scales.
This is the strongest flare seen so far in 2013. Increased numbers of flares are quite common at the moment, since the sun's normal 11-year activity cycle is ramping up toward solar maximum, which is expected in late 2013. Humans have tracked this solar cycle continuously since it was discovered, and it is normal for there to be many flares a day during the sun's peak activity.
For More Information
See http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/News031513-m6flare.html
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Writer
- Karen Fox (ADNET)
Producer
- Scott Wiessinger (KBRwyle)
Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Tapes
This visualization originally appeared on the following tapes:- None
Datasets used in this visualization
SOHO
SOHO monitors the Sun with a variety of instruments. Among the SOHO instruments is the Michelson Doppler Interferometer (MDI) and the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT).
Dataset can be found at: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov
See more visualizations using this data setSDO
Dataset can be found at: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/
See more visualizations using this data setSDO AIA 131 (A.K.A. 131 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
Dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See more visualizations using this data setSDO AIA 171 (A.K.A. 171 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
Dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
See more visualizations using this data setSOHO LASCO/C2 (A.K.A. C2) (Collected with the Large Angle Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO) sensor)
Dataset can be found at: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov
See more visualizations using this data setSOHO LASCO/C3 (A.K.A. C3) (Collected with the Large Angle Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO) sensor)
Dataset can be found at: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov
See more visualizations using this data setNote: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.