Radiation from Giant Solar Flare Hits Earth

Editor's Note: Tracking solar flare activity is particularly interesting this year, and notably in Honduras, with the impending end of the 5,125-year cycle known as the Maya "Long Count" calendar on December 21, 2012, and all the speculation surrounding its significance.

Honduras Weekly
The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, this weekend detected the biggest storm to erupt on the Sun since March 2005. The activity was observed by NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The radiation effects of the giant solar flare, which occurred at 11 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST) on Sunday, hit the Earth within an hour of the eruption and are expected to continue through tomorrow. The radiation, which has the potential to disrupt satellite communications and GPS (Global Positioning System) signals at high altitudes, travels from the Sun -- in the form of protons -- at a speed of 93 million miles per hour. It is followed by the ejection of solar plasma at a speed of 1-2 million miles per hour. The plasma can cause outages in the electrical grid, as occurred across most of Quebec, Canada, in 1989 following a severe geomagnetic storm.

"We haven't had anything like this for a number of years," said Antti Pulkkinen, a physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "It's kind of special."

During the past few years, the Sun has been relatively quiet, which was consistent with its normal cycles. But scientists had been predicting that the Sun might be entering an unusually quiet cycle that occurs perhaps once every century. The recent solar flare suggests that the super-quiet solar cycle may not occur. (1/24/12) (image of solar flare courtesy NASA)