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The sunspot targeting the Earth has the potential to cause solar flares, but experts told USA TODAY that this is far from uncommon and has allayed fears about how the flares will affect the Blue Planet.
The active region 3038 or AR3038 has been growing in the last week, said Rob Steinberg, acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Forecasting Service.
“That’s what sunspots do,” he said. “Over time, in general, they will grow. They go through stages and then fall apart.”
Sunspots look 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 in the sun from reaching its surface.
“I guess the easiest way to say that is that sunspots are areas of magnetic activity,” Steinberg said.
Solar eruptions, which are usually caused by sunspots, are “sudden bursts of energy caused by entanglement, intersection, or reorganization of magnetic field lines near sunspots,” NASA said.
“You can think of it as twisting rubber bands,” Steinberg said. “If you have a few rubber bands that twist on your finger, they end up twisting too much and breaking. The difference with magnetic fields is that they reconnect. And when they reconnect, a glare is generated in the process. “
The larger and more complex the sunspot becomes, the more likely it is to have solar flares, Steinberg said.
The sunspot has doubled in size every day for the past three days and is about 2.5 times larger than Earth, said in an email K. Alex Young, associate director of science in the heliophysics department at the Space Flight Center Goddard at NASA.
Young said the sunspot produces small solar flares, but “there is no complexity for the largest flares.” There is a 30% chance of the sunspot producing medium bursts and a 10% chance of creating large eruptions, he said.
W. Dean Pesnell, a researcher on the Solar Dynamics Observatory project, said the sunspot was “an active region of modest size” that “has not grown unusually fast and is still small in area”.
“AR 3038 is exactly the type of active region we expect at this point in the solar cycle,” he said.
Andres Munoz-Haramilo, a leading scientist at the Southwestern Research Institute in San Antonio, said the sunspot was nothing to worry about on Earth.
“I want to emphasize that there is no need to panic,” he said. “They happen all the time and we are prepared and doing everything we can to anticipate and mitigate their effects. For most of us, we don’t have to lose sleep because of it.”
Solar eruptions have different levels, Munoz-Haramilo said. The smallest are Class A torches, followed by B, C, M and X with the highest power. In each letter class there is a finer scale using numbers, and higher numbers mean more intensity.
The eruptions are too weak to noticeably affect the Earth, Munoz-Haramilo said. More intense M eruptions can disrupt radio communication at the Earth’s poles. X eruptions can disrupt satellites, communications systems and power grids and, in the worst case, cause power shortages and power outages.
Lower intensity solar flares are quite common; X eruptions are less, Steenburgh said. In one solar cycle, about 11 years, there are usually about 2,000 M1 eruptions, about 175 X1 eruptions and about eight X10 eruptions, he said. For the largest solar flares at X20 or more there is less than one per cycle. This solar cycle began in December 2019.
The AR3038 sunspot caused C eruptions, Steenburgh said. Although there have been no M or X eruptions in the area, he said there is potential for more intense eruptions next week or so.
The sun releases moderate solar flares
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Citation: “No need to panic” because sunspots with the potential for solar eruptions double in one night, say scientists (2022, June 22), extracted on June 22, 2022 from
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