On January 20, NASA captured an explosion at a distance of 90 million miles from Earth.
See also: NASA: Mysterious signals from "dusty" object discovered by TESS
The massive sparkling plasma ball at the heart of our solar system (also known as the Sun) emitted a solar flare on Thursday and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun, immortalized the moment. And now, two GIFs – technically, one is simply an enlarged version of the main – that highlight the impressive energy explosion.
Here is the full image. Even with zoom, the solar flare is very hard to miss. Just watch the right side of the image and you will see it.
And here is the zoom of the same moment.
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NASA is calling the moment a “medium-level” flare, with a classification of M5.5, which speaks to the power of the space weather event in the context of its impact on Earth. You see, solar flares like this one are essentially a massive release of electromagnetic radiation. When an outburst occurs, that radiation spreads throughout our solar system at the speed of light. And when it’s powerful enough, the burst of energy can directly affect radio waves, electronics, and other Earth-based technologies (the specific effects depend on the amount and type of energy released).
The «space weather scale» of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has classified this event as a solar flare at the second lowest level. A «moderate» radio blackout event, as this one with its M5 classification, can black out high‑frequency radio communications «for tens of minutes» on the sunlit side of Earth after the solar flare appearance. It can also interfere with low‑frequency navigation signals — to be clear, this is not the typical GPS of your smartphone (or the most modern navigation technology) — for a similar duration.
See also: NASA: You can hear the sound of Ganymede – Jupiter's icy moon
Even if you don't know anything about any of the underlying science, it's pretty cool to look at these images of our distant sun and see a visible burst of energy. But if you want to learn more, spaceweather.gov is a great place to start.
Information source: mashable.com
