A sunspot has doubled in size in 24 hours and is pointing at us.
According to Spaceweather.com, the sunspot grew to 2.5 times Earth's size from Sunday to Monday.
Sunspot are dark patches on the sun's surface where powerful magnetic fields are created by the flow of electric charges from the sun. The resulting release of energy causes a burst of radiation called a solar flare.
There is a strange new type of solar wave.
The sunspot was large yesterday. It's huge today. The sunspot doubled in size in 24 hours. There is an unstable 'beta-gamma' magnetic field that harbors energy for solar flares, and it is facing Earth.
When a solar flare hits Earth's upper atmosphere, the X-rays and ultraviolet radiation ionize atoms, making it impossible to bounce high- Frequency radio waves off them. The areas that are lit by the sun while a flare is going on are classified according to severity.
The Atlantic Ocean, Australia and Asia were affected by solar flares in the spring. When solar flares travel at the speed of light, they only take 8 minutes to reach us.
If an Earth-facing sunspot forms near the sun's equator, it takes less than two weeks for it to travel across the sun so that it is no longer facing Earth. Earth will remain in its crosshairs for a few more days due to the fact that AR3038 is just over halfway across.
The giant sunspot is not as frightening as it might seem. The European Space Agency wrote in a post that the flares it will most likely produce are M-class solar flares. The most common type of flares are M-class flares. Although the sun occasionally releases enormous X-class flares with the potential to cause high-frequency blackouts on the side of Earth that is exposed to the flare, these flares are rarely observed.
Sunspot can emit solar material. On planets with strong magnetic fields, the sun's debris is absorbed by our magnetic field and causes powerful storms. During these storms, Earth's magnetic field gets compressed by the waves of highly energetic particles, which trickle down magnetic-field lines near the poles and release energy in the form of light in the night sky.
Satellites can fall to Earth if the planet's magnetic field is disrupted by the movement of these charged particles. It takes around 15 to 18 hours for debris to reach Earth.
The sun has been more active than expected with nearly double the sunspot appearances predicted. The sun's activity is projected to increase over the next few years, reaching a maximum in 2025.
According to scientists, the largest solar storm ever witnessed was the 1859 Carrington event, which released the same amount of energy as 10 billion atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles fried telegraph systems all over the world, causing the Auroras to appear as far south as the Caribbean. The 1989 solar storm that caused a billion ton of gas to be released and caused a massive power failure in Quebec is what scientists warn about if a similar event were to happen today.
It was originally published on Live Science
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