A gigantic sunspot has inflated to twice the size of the Earth, doubling its diameter in 24 hours, and pointing directly at us.
The sunspot, called AR3038, grew up to 2.5 times the size of the Earth, making the sunspot approximately 19,800 miles or 31,900 kilometers in diameter, from Sunday (June 19) to Monday night. (June 20), according to Spaceweather.com, a website that tracks news about solar flares, geomagnetic storms and other cosmic weather events.
Sunspots are dark spots on the surface of the Sun where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electric charges from the Sun’s plasma, come together before suddenly breaking. The resulting energy release releases bursts of radiation called solar flares and generates explosive jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
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“Yesterday, the AR3038 sunspot was great. Today it’s huge. The fast-growing sunspot has doubled in just 24 hours,” Spaceweather.com reported. “AR3038 has an unstable ‘beta-gamma’ magnetic field that houses energy for the M class [medium-sized] solar flares and is directly in front of the Earth “.
When a solar eruption reaches the Earth’s upper atmosphere, the X-rays and ultraviolet radiation from the eruption ionize the atoms, making it impossible to bounce off high-frequency radio waves and create the so-called blackout. radio. Radio blackouts occur in areas of the Earth that are illuminated by the Sun while there is a flare; these blackouts are classified from R1 to R5 according to the ascending gravity.
In April and May, two solar flares caused R3 blackouts in the Atlantic Ocean, Australia and Asia, Live Science previously reported. Because solar flares travel at the speed of light, it only takes us 8 minutes to reach us, from an average distance of about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles).
If an Earth-oriented sunspot forms near the Sun’s equator (where AR3038 is located), it usually takes just under two weeks to travel through the Sun so that it is no longer looking toward Earth, according to SpaceWeatherLive .
Currently, AR3038 is located slightly north of the Sun’s equator and is just over halfway there, so the Earth will remain in the spotlight for a few more days.
Despite its alarmingly fast growth, the giant sunspot is less scary than it may seem. The eruptions it will likely produce are M-class solar flares, which “usually cause brief radio outages affecting the Earth’s polar regions,” along with minor radiation storms, the European Space Agency wrote in a blog post.
Class M eruptions are the most common type of solar flares. Although the Sun occasionally releases huge class X flares (the strongest category) with the potential to cause high frequency blackouts alongside the Earth that is exposed to the flare, these eruptions are observed much less frequently than the smallest solar flares.
Sunspots can also belch solar material. On planets that have strong magnetic fields, such as Earth, the rain of CME solar debris is absorbed by our magnetic field, causing powerful geomagnetic storms.
During these storms, the Earth’s magnetic field is slightly compressed by waves of highly energetic particles, which are depleted by magnetic field lines near the poles and shake the molecules in the atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light to create colorful auroras in the night sky. .
The movements of these electrically charged particles can disrupt our planet’s magnetic field with enough force to send satellites to Earth, Live Science previously reported, and scientists have warned that extreme geomagnetic storms could even paralyze the Internet.
The erupting debris from CMEs typically takes 15 to 18 hours to reach Earth, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Forecasting Center.
Astronomers have known since 1775 that solar activity increases and decreases according to a cycle of about 11 years, but recently, the Sun has been more active than expected, with almost twice the number of sunspots predicted by NOAA. The Sun’s activity is expected to increase steadily over the next few years, reaching a general high in 2025 before declining again.
Scientists believe that the largest solar storm ever witnessed in contemporary history was the Carrington event of 1859, which released approximately the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After sinking on Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles fried telegraph systems around the world and caused auroras brighter than full moon light to appear as far south as the Caribbean.
If a similar event happened today, scientists warn, it would cause billions of dollars in damage and cause widespread blackouts, such as the 1989 solar storm that released a billion-ton gas plume and caused a blackout across the Canadian province. of Quebec, NASA reported.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.