Solar flares erupt from Sun on Christmas: Will aurorae trigger ‘fireworks’?

Science: In the final hours of Christmas Day, the sun unleashed four solar flares in less than three hours. The largest flare in the series, recorded at M7.3, erupted from sunspot region AR3938 at 10:15 p.m. EST on Dec. 25 (0315 GMT on Dec. 26). Solar flares are ranked and classified based on their strength on a 4-level classification scale, with M-class being the second most powerful and X-class being the most powerful at the top.

According to Spaceweather.com, this was part of a cluster of four separate flares that occurred within two and a half hours across three sunspot regions — AR3938, AR3933 and AR3936. In footage of the sun taken during the time period, it looks like the lights on a Christmas tree are flickering and going off.

This same active show on the sun can be seen in images captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) on its Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-16).

These types of synchronized eruptions are called sympathetic solar flares, and they are a very rare phenomenon. When these eruptions occur at roughly the same time from different sunspot regions, they are actually linked together and do not erupt on their own. This can happen when sunspots are very far from each other but still connected by magnetic loops that are invisible to the eye.

As always, the big question when solar flares occur is whether we will have any effects on Earth from the sun’s eruptions (which, for space lovers, would be another opportunity to see aurorae).

At this time, it appears that the coronal mass ejection (CME) resulting from the M7.3 flare will not occur north of our planet, according to a Thursday morning discussion by forecasters at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). CMEs are supercharged plasma bubbles that are thrown into space after powerful solar flare explosions.