Look Skyward: More Solar Weather

Image Source: 3D Sun News Viewer.

Further to my comments from a couple of days ago (here) about sunspots, explosions on the surface of the Sun and wild speculation about the corresponding impact on Earth's magnetic field, the strongest solar flare yet this year occurred today; a Coronal Mass Ejection of electro-magnetic and charged particles will reach Earth on February 15. (Hat tip: @KateSherrod.)

NASA's Solar Dynamics Obervatory, operated by Heliophysicists who keep an eye on our star, released a picture of today's solar event, which will no doubt generate more auroras:

M6.6 Solar Flare, 13 February 2011. Image Source: NASA.

Spaceweather.com reports:

The eruption produced a loud blast of radio waves heard in shortwave receivers around the dayside of our planet. In New Mexico, amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft recorded these sounds at 19 to 21 MHz. "This was some of the strongest radio bursting of the new solar cycle," he says. "What a great solar day." Preliminary coronagraph data from STEREO-A and SOHO agree that the explosion produced a fast but not particularly bright coronal mass ejection (CME). The cloud will likely hit Earth's magnetic field on or about Feb. 15th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras. The source of this activity, sunspot 1158 is growing rapidly (48 hour movie). The active region is now more than 100,000 km wide with at least a dozen Earth-sized dark cores scattered beneath its unstable magnetic canopy. More Earth-directed eruptions are likely in the hours ahead.

ADDENDUM: Thanks again to Kate Sherrod, who tweeted that another, bigger monster solar flare occurred on February 15, the effects of which will reach us around February 17.

Image Source: 3D Sun News Viewer.