April 13, 2001

1 min read

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Sun Fires Forceful Flare Earthward

By Kate Wong

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Image: NASA

The Sun hurled another powerful flare in our direction on Tuesday, the most recent in a series of solar explosions that included one of the most powerful observed in 25 years. The blast belongs to category of flares known as X-class flares and appears to come from an active region of the Sun known as 9415.

Solar flares rank among our Sun's most powerful emissions, exploding with as much force as a billion megatons of TNT. They are caused by the sudden release of magnetic energy. In fact, such blasts can drive solar particles to extremely high velocities, approaching the speed of light. Tuesday's flare was accompanied by a cloud of electrified, magnetic gas called a coronal mass ejection, or CME.

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Taking the complex magnetic field structure of region 9415 into consideration, researchers expect that the area will fire off more solar outbursts in the future. "This is another in an exciting series of solar events," NASA's Ernest Hildler remarks, "during this maximum epoch of the current solar activity cycle."

Kate Wong is an award-winning science writer and senior editor for features at Scientific American, where she has focused on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has covered for nearly 30 years. Recently she has become obsessed with birds. Her reporting has taken her to caves in France and Croatia that Neandertals once called home to the shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana in search of the oldest stone tools in the world, as well as to Madagascar on an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, the icy waters of Antarctica, where humpback whales feast on krill, and a “Big Day” race around the state of Connecticut to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours. Wong is co-author, with Donald Johanson, of Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. She holds a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow her on Bluesky @katewong.bsky.social

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