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Biggest solar flare on record
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THE sun has unleashed a huge flare, one of the biggest explosions ever seen in the star's atmosphere, the European-US sun observing spacecraft SOHO revealed.
The major flare was produced at 21.51 UT on Monday in the active region AR9393, the host of the largest sunspot in a decade, said the scientists for the SOHO on Wednesday.
Now reclassified as at least an X20, the flare appears to be the biggest on record, most likely bigger than the record X20 flare on August 16, 1989.
The big explosion, which took place near the Sun's northwest limb, hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space -- at a whopping speed of roughly 7.2 million kilometres per hour, but not directly toward the earth. Thus, the impacts on the Earth will probably be less severe.
The active region AR9393 produced several solar flares and CMEs during the last week. One of the CMEs produced a powerful geomagnetic storm that raged for more than 24 hours this weekend, dazzling sky watchers who saw aurora borealis as far south as Mexico.
"Given that a comparatively modest flare resulted in such intense geomagnetic activity, we are perhaps lucky that this event didn't occur over the weekend, when the resulting CME would almost certainly have been aimed toward earth," said the scientists.
The CME, associated with the X15 flare in March 1989, caused major power failures in Canada, and subsequent smaller events have disrupted communication and navigation satellites.
(Xinhua)
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