Far side fireworks

Wednesday, 1 May 2019 08:48 UTC

Far side fireworks

Not much to report on the earth-facing side of the moment but the Sun's far side has sprung back to life with two distinct areas firing off eruptions.

Yesterday there were two eruptions from two separate areas on the fire side (but one eruption was way bigger than the other) and this morning there was another minor eruption between 4 and 5 UTC. All of these events produced coronal mass ejections (not aimed at Earth of course) but there was one coronal mass ejection that was by far the largest. On the images from SOHO we saw a clear halo coronal mass ejection but because it came from the far side the blast is aimed away from us. Like we said, these eruptions are not going to impact Earth in any way right now but should these regions survive for two more weeks they could be facing Earth and launching eruptions towards us. Fingers crossed!

This image that we posted on Twitter and Facebook shows the two eruptive areas as seen by STEREO Ahead EUVI 195 and the largest of the three coronal mass ejections as seen by STEREO Ahead COR2.

 

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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