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A sunspot pointing to Earth has the potential to cause solar flares, but experts told USA TODAY that it is far from unusual and eased concerns about how the eruptions would affect the Blue Planet.
The active region 3038, or AR3038, has been growing over the past week, said Rob Steenburgh, acting leader of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Meteorological Forecasting Office.
“That’s what sunspots do,” he said. “Over time, they will generally grow. They go through stages, and then they decline.”
Sunspots appear darker because they are cooler than other parts of the sun’s surface, according to NASA. Sunspots are cooler because they form where strong magnetic fields prevent heat inside the sun from reaching its surface.
“I guess the easiest way to say that is that sunspots are regions of magnetic activity,” Steenburgh said.
Solar flares, which usually come out of sunspots, are “a sudden burst of energy caused by the entanglement, crossing, or reorganization of magnetic field lines near sunspots,” NASA said.
“You can think of this as the rubber band twist,” Steenburgh said. “If you have a pair of elastic bands spinning on your finger, they eventually twist too much and break. The difference with magnetic fields is that they reconnect. And when they reconnect, it’s in this process that an eruption is generated. … “
The larger and more complex a sunspot becomes, the greater the likelihood of solar flares, Steenburgh said.
The sunspot has doubled in size over the past three days and is about 2.5 times the size of Earth, said C. Alex Young, associate director of science at Goddard’s Heliophysical Science Division, in an email. NASA Space Flight Center.
Young said the sunspot is producing small solar flares, but “it doesn’t have the complexity for larger eruptions.” There is a 30% chance that the sunspot will produce medium-sized flares and a 10% chance that it will create large flares, he said.
W. Dean Pesnell, a project scientist at the Solar Dynamics Observatory, said the sunspot is an “active region of modest size” that “hasn’t grown abnormally fast and is still a little small in area.”
“AR 3038 is exactly the type of active region we expect at this point in the solar cycle,” he said.
Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo, chief scientist at the Southwest San Antonio Research Institute, said sunspot is nothing to worry about people on Earth.
“I want to stress that you don’t have to panic,” he said. “They happen all the time, and we’re prepared and doing our best to predict and mitigate their effects. For most of us, we don’t need to lose sleep because of this.”
Solar flares have different levels, Muñoz-Jaramillo said. The smallest are Class A flares, followed by B, C, M and X with the highest strength. Within each letter class there is a finer scale using numbers, and higher numbers denote more intensity.
The C flares are too weak to significantly affect the Earth, Muñoz-Jaramillo said. The most intense M flares can disrupt radio communication at Earth’s poles. Flares X can disrupt satellites, communications systems, and power grids, and in the worst case, cause power outages and power outages.
Low-intensity solar flares are quite common; X flares are less so, Steenburgh said. In a single solar cycle, about 11 years, there are usually about 2,000 M1 flares, about 175 X1 flares and about eight X10 flares, he said. For solar flares larger than X20 or higher, there are fewer than one per cycle. This solar cycle began in December 2019.
AR3038 sunspot has caused C eruptions, Steenburgh said. While there have been no M or X eruptions in this area, he said there is potential for more intense eruptions over the next week or so.
The sun releases a moderate solar flare
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Quote: “Don’t panic” as the sunspot with the potential for solar flares doubles overnight, according to scientists (2022, June 22) recovered on June 22, 2022
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