A huge solar flare was released by the sun on Saturday, resulting in a radio blackout on Earth that last for several minutes.
A report from the Space Weather Prediction Center, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), says the short X1-class flare erupted at 1:48 p.m. EDT (17:48 GMT) from the sunspot action region (AR) 2017, according to The Christian Science Monitor.
AR2017 is currently decaying, but the report said it can still produce more solar flares in the near future. A video of the solar flare was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
"Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation," said Karen Fox of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however- when intense enough- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel."
A solar flare takes places when extremely stressed magnetic field lines are pushed together over "active regions", which are areas of intense magnetic activity, Discovery News reported. Astronomers use sunspots to record solar activity since sunspot clusters often inhabit active regions.
The update from NOAA said the solar flare from Saturday, as well as several recent eruptions of super-hot solar plasma (coronal mass ejections), could start a small geomagnetic storm on April 2. Astronomer Tony Phillips wrote on Spaceweather.com that the storm could lead to more displays of Earth's northern lights. Phillips added that the flare blacked out terrestrial radio signals, but it was able to produce radio signals, The Christian Science Monitor reported.
"The explosion above sunspot AR2017 sent shock waves racing through the sun's atmosphere at speeds as high as 4,800 km/s (11 million mph)," Phillips wrote. "Radio emissions stimulated by those shocks crossed the 93 million mile divide to Earth, causing shortwave radio receivers to roar with static."
The sun is currently going through the decline of solar maximum, the height of its close to 11-year solar cycle, Discovery News reported. The recent flare shows that while Solar Cycle 24 has produced low levels of magnetic activity, it is still able to create huge explosions.
