Monster sunspot, the size of Jupiter, blasts out powerful X3.1-class solar flare
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Friday, October 24, 2014, 8:17 PM - A monster sunspot, that's been creeping its way across the face of the Sun for the past week and showing up in nearly every solar eclipse photo taken on Thursday, erupted with a spectacularly bright solar flare early Friday evening.
This sunspot, technically called Active Region 12192 (or just AR 12192), is the largest one recorded so far in this latest solar cycle. Over the past week, it has gone from simply dwarfing our tiny planet Earth to rivaling the size of Jupiter - the largest planet in the solar system!
So far, since it rounded the eastern limb of the Sun, it has been crackling with weak and moderate-strength flares (C- and M-class, respectively). It even produced two X-class flares, one on Sunday and another Wednesday, although they were on the weak-end of the X-class scale.
The flare AR 12192 blasted out Friday evening, though, was significantly more powerful, ranking as
The intensely orange view of the sun in the above video, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), comes from the satellite's Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) and gives a colourized 'filtered white light' representation of the Sun's surface. This best shows off the structure of sunspots.
In the video below, the gold view is filtered so that only the 171 Angstrom (extreme ultraviolet) wavelength of light gets through to SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument. According to the NASA SDO website: This channel is especially good at showing coronal loops - the arcs extending off of the Sun where plasma moves along magnetic field lines. The brightest spots seen here are locations where the magnetic field near the surface is exceptionally strong.
The region of AR 12192, and indeed much of the equatorial region of the sun, is alive with coronal loops and this view even picks up some of the intense flares sparked from the region.
This green view, showing only the 94 Angstrom (extreme ultraviolet/soft x-rays) wavelength, is designed specifically to study solar flares, according to NASA. It measures extremely hot temperatures of around 6 million Kelvin, and with darker green being cooler temperatures and the hottest temperatures ramping up to bright white. As you watch, note the strong flare it starts out with, and towards the end of the video, you can see AR 12192 grow more intense until it blasts out the X3.1-class flare.
A close-up view of the flare, in the red 304 Angstrom wavelength, captures the filaments of plasma contrasted with the bright flash of x-rays. It also reveals that there doesn't appear to have been a coronal mass ejection along with the flare.
Image and Video credits: NASA SDO
