The Sun is approaching its solar maximum, the apex of its 11-year solar cycle. With that we can expect more tempestuous and violent solar storms and it just released an absolute behemoth of a flare.
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00:00The Sun is approaching its solar maximum, the apex of its 11-year solar cycle.
00:08With that, we can expect more tempestuous and violent solar storms, and the Sun just
00:12released an absolute behemoth of a flare.
00:16Experts have clocked the event on October 3rd as an X9.0, not just the strongest category
00:21of solar flare, but also the most extreme one in 7 years.
00:25What's more, it was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection, while the flare was aimed right
00:29at Earth, meaning we're in for one heck of a geomagnetic storm.
00:32The last solar flare of this magnitude occurred way back in 2017, when the Sun released an
00:37X11.88 flare, that came from the same region as the most recent one as well.
00:43Experts now say that billions of solar particles are headed our way, and will likely get tangled
00:47up in our planet's magnetosphere.
00:49When they interact with the Earth's atmospheric particles, they ionize in the thermosphere,
00:53creating beautiful auroras.
00:55NOAA has now forecasted several days of auroras in the future, meaning keep your eyes skyward
01:00if you want to see one of the cosmos' greatest shows.
01:02October 3rd's solar flare has now been clocked as one of the top 20 strongest ever recorded.