A 'gargantuan' sunspot erupted. Everything you need to know about the solar event and how it impacts Earth

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Sunspots can cause bursts of energy, solar flares and solar eruptions which can impact satellites, navigation signals, or knock out power grids

With a sunspot, you have a magnetic field and it basically freezes that convection cell and causes the sun to cool down. It looks black because the cool stuff rises and gets stuck there. The plasma is a little cooler than the plasma around it. It’s still quite hot. It’s not like icy, or anything.

Imagery of a solar flare, as seen in the bright flash. A loop of solar material, a coronal mass ejection, can also be seen rising up off the right limb of the Sun.With a coronal mass ejection, stuff from the corona gets sent out into space and it gets that kick from those twisting magnetic field lines.

Scientists always get excited when there’s big exciting explosions in space. It’s not that this is particularly unusual. It’s just that as the sun gets more and more active, these types of events become more common. The sun’s got this cycle which is about 11 years long, from being inactive to active to inactive again. It takes a full 11 years for that to happen. But every single cycle is not exactly the same.

Canada has space weather forecasting and so does the United States. And there are satellites that are monitoring the sun all the time in order to do these forecasting events. You get a warning when there’s a big coronal mass ejection. We know, okay, we’ve got time, there is this potential geomagnetic storm coming. Satellite operators can be warned. If they’re responsible at all, they have plans for how to deal with this. So they might shut down their systems or put them into safe mode.

 

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A 'gargantuan' sunspot erupted. Everything you need to know about the solar event and how it impacts EarthSunspots can cause bursts of energy, solar flares and solar eruptions which can impact satellites, navigation signals, or knock out power grids
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