The news has been weird and wild this year, and there doesn’t appear to be any end to the strange.
The crazy even extends beyond planet Earth. The Sun has had an intense month of activity, emitting powerful energy bursts.
On Tuesday, our star fired off two enormous explosions from its farside in what has already been a heavy month of solar activity.A magnificent coronal mass ejection (CME) was recorded by Nasa’s STEREO-A spacecraft in the early hours of February 15.CMEs are giant eruptions that send plasma hurtling through space – and the Sun has undergone several of them throughout the month.If they hit Earth, the plumes of material can trigger geomagnetic storms that knock out satellites and disrupt power grids.Fortunately, this week’s CME was fired from the side of the Sun that faces away from our planet and so poses no threat, says astronomer Dr Tony Phillips.Writing on his website spaceweather.com, which tracks the sun’s activity, he said: “This CME will not hit Earth; it is moving away from, not toward our planet.“However, if such a CME did strike, it could produce a very strong geomagnetic storm. We may have dodged a bullet.”
Coronal mass ejections or CMEs are massive clouds of particles that are pushed out into space from the Sun’s atmosphere. These differ from solar flares, which are giant bursts of X-rays and energy that travel at the speed of light across all directions in the solar system.
It turns out the Sun has also been emitting those quite frequently this month, too.
According to SpaceWeatherLive, which tracks solar activity, the Sun has erupted every day for the month of February, with some days featuring multiple flares. That includes three of the second-most powerful flare category, M-class flares: an M1.4 on February 12; an M1 on February 14; and an M1.3 on February 15. There were also five M-class flares in January.The mild geomagnetic storm that knocked 40 newly launched Starlink satellites from low-Earth orbit followed an M-class flare that took place on January 29. Ejecta from a solar eruption usually take a few days to reach Earth, depending how fast the material is traveling. The remaining flares that have taken place in February have so far been in the milder C-class category.
Finally, the Sun can also emit solar prominences. Prominences are bright, relatively dense, and relatively cool arched clouds of ionized gas in the chromosphere and corona of the Sun.
The Solar Orbiter, a Sun-observing satellite developed by the European Space Agency, has just captured the first image of a huge solar prominence.
It’s the largest such event ever observed in a single image along with the full solar disk and will add to the joint NASA-European mission to better understand solar activity, mission officials said in a statement….The event captured on Tuesday (Feb. 15) saw a prominence jetting out millions of miles out into space, with the coronal mass ejection not directed towards our planet, ESA noted. It was imaged by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager on Solar Orbiter.”Other space telescopes such as the ESA/NASA SOHO [Solar and Heliospheric Observatory] satellite frequently see solar activity like this, but either closer to the sun, or further out by means of an occulter, which blocks out the glare of the sun’s disk to enable detailed imagery of the corona itself,” ESA said.”Thus, the prominence observed by Solar Orbiter is the largest ever event of its kind to be captured in a single field of view together with the solar disk, opening up new possibilities to see how events like these connect to the solar disk for the first time. At the same time, SOHO can provide complementary views to even larger distances,” ESA added.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently elected two science missions [the Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE) and HelioSwarm] to help improve our understanding of the dynamics of the Sun. They are set to launch by 2026 . . . perhaps not a moment too soon!
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