Here’s a lovely NASA video a solar flare imaged several different ways, though I’m not fond of the music. Read the link in the preceding sentence to see how they’re caused.
On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled away from the sun at over 900 miles per second. This movie shows the ejection from a variety of viewpoints as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), and the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
And here’s a “cannibal coronal mass” from just three days ago: one ejection eats up another one. These things can cause spectacular auroras on Earth.
h/t: Rick
These can be much worse. Take a look at Wikipedia’s page on the Carrington Event of 1859 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event). Of course, there were virtually no electronics back then. If something like this happened today, all hell would break loose. Perhaps people don’t fear these things as much as they should, probably because they’d make for a pretty lousy disaster movie.
The ‘cannibal’ event has brought about spectacular auroras as far south as Hadrian’s Wall; see last pic here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/59165136
We were walking the Wall near Sycamore Gap last week. Unfortunately, it was cloudy most of the time!
Very impressive. Weird too how you can see streamers of stuff fall in to the sun along the magnetic field lines.
Good post – no power outages that I know of, although the alarm on my phone did not go off and I wonder if it was somehow related? I wish there was more attention given to solar cycles (as in solar maximum and minimum) and the effect on climate change. CO2 is only a small part of the puzzle.