THE SUN CONTINUES TO BE INCREDIBLY ACTIVE WITH MULTIPLE SUNSPOT REGIONS FIRING OFF IMPRESSIVE SOLAR FLARES! FINGERS CROSSED THIS TREND CONTINUES AS THEY ROTATE INTO THE EARTH STRIKE ZONE! 🙀🤯🤩💚💜💙✨️ - 15/05/24
The Sun just keeps on giving with a stream of strong solar flares! There are so many flares it's hard to keep track of them! Here is a quick round up of some interesting flares from the last 24 hours or so.
The incredible sunspot region AR3664 continues to produce flare after flare including many X flares and an incredible X8.7 solar flare! That's a very impressive flare indeed, in fact it is the largest solar flare from within this solar cycle and and the strongest since 2017! Given the region had partially rotated out of view at the time of measurement, it is possible that the flare was even stronger!
This X8.7 flare did produce a coronal mass ejection, but sadly given this was produced when the sunspot region was rotating out of view, the charged particles will be heading away from Earth. However while this is the case, it is amazing to see this region continuing to produce multiple strong flares. In fact it produced another X3.4 solar flare today! It has now produced a total of TWELVE X flares! We can only hope that this region stays strong and continues to provide the goods when it rotates back into view! Fingers crossed!
So, aside from the incredible AR3664, AR3682 has been very busy and let off an impressive M4.4 solar flare, that again produced a coronal mass ejection. In fact this region has been popping off M flares like there's no tomorrow! While anything from this will be heading away from us, it's awesome to see the region so active. We can't wait for AR3682 to rotate and enter the Earth strike zone.
Yet another active region is now rotating into view from the East limb of the Sun is looking very exciting too! This is a new active region and has just produced an X2.99 flare! This flare peaked at 14:38 today! Again, if anything is produced from this, it's likely to head off away from Earth.
Aside from flares, an impressive solar filament eruption took place in the Northeast quadrant of the Sun and produced a light bulb shaped CME. While this largely appears to be headeding Northwards and will likely miss us, there may be a possibility of a glancing blow. We will see.
While it looks like these eruptions all appear to be heading away from Earth, as we mentioned earlier, it's very exciting to see the incredible AR3664 continue to be strong and to also now to have more active sunspot regions rotating into view. Fingers crossed AR3664 survives the rotation around the far side of the Sun and maybe even comes back stronger!? Also fingers crossed that the multiple very active regions rotating into view on the Eastern limb continue to be active as they rotate into the Earth strike zone and potentially produce some Earth bound Coronal Mass Ejections and trigger some beautiful Northern Lights Displays. Fingers crossed please everybody! 🤞
ATTACHED: GIF showing the incredible parting gift from active region AR3664 - The impressive X8.7 solar flare. 🤯💚