Courtesy SOHO/LASCO (ESA & NASA)
These two views of the October 28 solar flare were captured by the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment, an instrument aboard the SOHO satellite. This experiment incorporates three telescopes that blot out the sun’s blindingly bright disk to reveal fainter emissions in a million-mile-wide swath of the surrounding corona. The C2 (top) and C3 (bottom) telescopes show the flare 20 and 68 minutes after it exploded at 6:10 a.m. EST.
Early in the morning of October 28, the space-based Solar and Heliospheric Observatory recorded an enormous mass of plasma erupting from the surface of the sun and heading almost directly toward Earth. The titanic explosion, which occurred above a short-lived solar magnetic tempest known as sunspot 10486, produced the third most powerful solar X-ray flare ever detected. Within seconds, our planet was bombarded with a flood of intense radiation, which ionized the upper layers ...
