Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Earth directed M-Class Flare with Current LASCO C2 and LASCO C3 - Tue Sep 6 2011


EARTH-DIRECTED FLARE: This morning at 0150 UT, sunspot 1283 produced an M5.3-class solar flare. A movie from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the flash of extreme UV radiation. Because of the sunspot's central location on the solar disk, the eruption was Earth-directed and a CME might be heading our way.
http://spaceweather.com/
LASCO Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LASCO_Large...



Solar flares are tremendous explosions on the surface of the Sun. In a matter of just a few minutes they heat material to many millions of degrees and release as much energy as a billion megatons of TNT. They occur near sunspots, usually along the dividing line (neutral line) between areas of oppositely directed magnetic fields.

Flares release energy in many forms - electro-magnetic (Gamma rays and X-rays), energetic particles (protons and electrons), and mass flows. Flares are characterized by their brightness in X-rays (X-Ray flux). The biggest flares are X-Class flares. M-Class flares have a tenth the energy and C-Class flares have a tenth of the X-ray flux seen in M-Class flares. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) monitors the X-Ray flux from the Sun with detectors on some of its satellites

Source / Credit: NASA

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