First ‘X-class’ monster solar flare of 2015 triggers radio signal blackouts

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http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/first-x-class-monster-solar-flare-of-2015-triggers-radio-signal-blackouts/

First ‘X-class’ monster solar flare of 2015 triggers radio signal blackouts

The powerful X-class solar flare caused radio signals around the globe to be blacked out for some 15 minutes, astronomers say.

Delila James | Science Recorder | March 16, 2015

Shortly after noon ET on Wednesday, the sun erupted with a monster solar flare—the first X-class flare of this year, according to Spaceweather.com. A short while later, reports came in of radio signal blackouts around the globe.

“The X-flare scrambled the ionosphere thoroughly so that no decametric radio signals were supported in my part of the world,” said Thomas Ashcraft, an amateur radio astronomer based in New Mexico, as reported by Discovery News. “The ionosphere started to reform after about fifteen minutes when stations began to reappear.”

Solar flares occur when magnetic energy stored in the sun’s corona is suddenly released, sending massive clouds of electrons, atoms, and ions into space. Often, as on Wednesday, a solar flare is followed by a coronal mass ejection—a massive release of gas and magnetized plasma from the sun’s corona.

Also, on March 12th, the sun emitted an enormous shortwave radio burst, which caused the airwaves to be filled with solar static for some three minutes, noted Ashcraft  in a Spaceweather.com report. The sounds of static are caused by beams of electrons, accelerated by the solar flare. These electrons break through the sun’s atmosphere, then rain down waves of plasma and radio emissions that can be detected here on Earth nearly 93,000,000 miles away.

Solar flares are accompanied by intense coronal activity that causes rapid magnetic reconfiguration events, or ‘reconnection.’ These events generate intense X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) radiation that can affect planet Earth. On March 12, NASA launched its four Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) satellites designed to detect reconnection events and help scientists better understand the mechanisms that trigger them.