C8.9 solar flare from sunspot region 2497

Thursday, 11 February 2016 21:34 UTC

C8.9 solar flare from sunspot region 2497

Finally some solar activity worth mentioning! A long duration C8.9 solar flare took place around sunspot region 2497 and peaked today at 21:03 UTC.

Sunspot region 2497 (Beta-Gamma) is facing Earth right now and first signs show that this solar flare might indeed be an eruptive event. That means it likely launched a coronal mass ejection!

ALERT: Type II Radio Emission
Begin Time: 2016 Feb 11 2035 UTC
Estimated Velocity: 483 km/s
ALERT: Type IV Radio Emission
Begin Time: 2016 Feb 11 2228 UTC



Animation: SDO diffrence imagery showing the eruptive nature of this event. Source: SIDC.

We still need to wait for SOHO/LASCO coronagraph imagery to determine if this coronal mass ejection will have an Earth-directed component but it is likely that at least some of the ejected material will come towards Earth as sunspot region 2497 is in an excellent Earth-facing position. More on that tomorrow when we have all the SOHO coronagraph imagery that we need.

Any mentioned solar flare in this article has a scaling factor applied by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the reported solar flares are 42% smaller than for the science quality data. The scaling factor has been removed from our archived solar flare data to reflect the true physical units.

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