Sun Unleashes Major Solar Flare at Earth (Video)

Sun Unleashes Major Solar Flare at Earth (Video):

A big storm erupted on the sun today (Sept. 10), and Earth was in the crosshairs.

The sun unleashed an X-class solar flare — the most powerful type — at 1:45 p.m. EDT (1745 GMT) today from an Earth-facing sunspot known as Active Region 2158, which also fired off another intense solar flare yesterday. Both space weather events were captured on camera by NASA’s sun-watching Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft.

Today’s solar flare qualifies as an X1.6 storm but poses no danger to anyone on Earth or the astronauts living aboard the International Space Station, NASA officials told Space.com. However, some people’s lives could be affected by the solar tempest.

"Impacts to HF [high-frequency] radio communications on the daylight side of Earth are expected to last for more than an hour," researchers with the National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) wrote in an online update today.

Further effects could be felt later in the week if the sunspot also fired off a cloud of superhot plasma known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). CMEs often accompany powerful flares and can trigger geomagnetic storms when they hit Earth, typically two to three days after erupting.