What do you know about the huge sunspot facing Earth again?

The culprit? A geomagnetic storm, stimulated by high-energy, magnetic particles emitted from a sunspot — a bruise-like color change on the surface of the Sun. The same sunspot mass, which had spent several weeks hiding on the back side of the Sun, is now orbiting back toward Earth again.

There is a possibility that there will be more geomagnetic storms of varying strength over the next two weeks or so as sunspots cross from left to right across the solar disk. (It takes the Sun about 27 days to rotate once.) Another severe geomagnetic storm is unlikely to occur in the near future, but moderate to severe geomagnetic storms are not out of the question if a solar flare erupts from properly located sunspots. gathering.

It is technically the third time the sunspot cluster has encountered Earth. They spent the first half of May aiming at us, then returned at the end of the month into early June. Now Earth is in the line of fire again.

Each time the sunspot group returns to the Earth-facing side of the sun, it is assigned a new number. In May, the “active area was 3,664.” Then 3697. Now it's AR3723, and it's brimming with magnetism.

On Sunday, for example, AR3723 released an M-class solar flare. This is the second highest tier on the scale (they are A, B, C, M, and X, with X-class flares being the largest). The pulse of radiation helped ionize the Earth's upper atmosphere, cRead a report about a shortwave radio broadcast outage Over the Atlantic Ocean for several hours. AR3723 is poised to produce more magnetic hiccups in the coming days and weeks.

Solar flares are intense explosions of high-energy particles and electrons that race through space at nearly the speed of light. They appear as intense bursts of faint light on the sun. Slower-moving magnetic shock waves, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), are sometimes followed; They shoot through space like an interstellar tsunami. If a coronal ejection mass hits Earth, its chaotic magnetism could interact with Earth's magnetic field, producing rings of northern (and southern) lights.

It's too early to know exactly what the AR3723 has in store.

It will take a day or so for it to become better visible to observing satellites, which will help scientists at the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, better determine its magnetic structure. From there, scientists can make probabilistic predictions — for example, predicting the odds of an M-class or X-class solar flare occurring in a given time frame. These explosions send high-energy particles toward Earth, which can cause interruptions of short radio waves on the sunlit side of the planet.

The mass of sunspots is much smaller than it was before. But apparently their magnetic structure is still enough to emit powerful flares. The Space Weather Prediction Center notes that AR3723 “remains the most magnetically complex masculine group” but has not evolved much in the past day or so.