Considered one of the biggest and most densely populated sunspot regions seen in greater than a decade has appeared on the sun’s nearside to Earth — and has begun to unleash a barrage of solar storms which might be shaking up our home star’s surface in an enormous way. The sunspots’ emergence could make it an interesting few weeks for Earth, which can soon be within the firing line of those eruptive dark patches.
The primary sunspot group, named AR3490, rotated onto the sun’s nearside on Nov. 18 over the star’s northeastern shoulder. The dark patch was quickly followed by one other sunspot group, AR3491, which trailed in its wake, Spaceweather.com reported.
Scientists already knew that the sunspot groups were on their way because that they had been tracking “helioseismic tremors,” or ripples within the sun’s surface, from the realm. The sunspot region is “so large, it’s affecting the way in which the entire sun vibrates,” Spaceweather.com representatives wrote.
Since emerging, the sunspot groups have split up and birthed latest dark patches, including AR3492, AR3495, AR3496 and AR3497, which has created a “solar archipelago of sunspots,” astronomy news site EarthSky reported. In total, the large collection of sunspots spans around 125,000 miles (200,000 kilometers) across, which is greater than 15 times wider than Earth, based on Spaceweather.com.
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The sunspots have already spat out not less than 16 C-class and three M-class solar flares — that are the third and second strongest flare classes, respectively — within the last 4 days, based on SpaceWeatherLive.com. And experts are warning that there may very well be many more of those flares in the subsequent few weeks, in addition to potentially X-class flares, the strongest variety of solar flare.
The upcoming flares might also birth coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or enormous blobs of charged solar particles, that would slam into Earth and trigger strong geomagnetic storms, which could cause radio blackouts and spark vibrant aurora displays.
Astronomers have also spotted several large loops of plasma, often called solar prominences, growing above a number of the sunspots within the group. The most important loops tower greater than 40,000 miles (64,000 km) above the surface, based on EarthSky, and will snap off and fling into space at any moment, temporarily forsaking enormous “canyons of fireside” within the sun’s surface.
A minimum of three sunspot groups have also emerged on the sun’s southern hemisphere in the previous few days.
The sunspots’ emergence is the most recent sign that the sun is fast approaching the explosive peak in its roughly 11-year solar cycle, often called the solar maximum, which scientists now predict will begin next yr.
During solar maximum, sunspots grow to be rather more frequent and increase in size because the sun’s magnetic fields get tousled, allowing the dark patches to grow more easily.
The newest dark patches make up “probably the most important sunspot region I’ve seen to this point from [the current] solar cycle,” Chris Wicklund, a meteorologist and aurora photographer, wrote on X (formerly often called Twitter). “The subsequent 14 days may very well be very interesting,” he added.