Friday's Solar Flare Twice As Energetic As Monday's; Earth Safe

The Bad Astronomer writes "The sunspot cluster that erupted in a solar flare and coronal mass ejection last Monday burst into life again on Friday, blasting out an X2 class solar flare, twice as energetic as the last one. This one was on the Sun's limb and was pointed away from us, so we're in no danger; all we got was a very minor radiation storm that's on the lowest ranking of such things. But it did put on quite a light show, which you can see in a video created with images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory."

Comments

Re:Sun's limb?

[rubycodez]

the word "limb" has alternative definitions than the usual use of "branch of tree" or "member of animal's body other than head or trunk". These alternatives come from Latin "limbus", meaning border. In astronomy, the definition is "The circumferential edge of the apparent disk of a celestial body." There is a related definition in mathematics: "The edge of a graduated arc or circle used in an instrument to measure angles" --http://www.thefreedictionary.com/limb

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

We do. in addition to SDO, in inclined geosync orbit, we have two spacecraft in heliocentric orbits somewhat ahead of and somewhat behind the Earth. They're called STEREO.

http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/where.shtml

- Morty [Posting AC because I've spent mod points.]

Re:Earth gets hit with X2 all the time

[kc0dby]

Wikipedia has a nice, but tiny list of major recent flares, that will give you an idea. It looks like on a decade scale, X2 is pretty minor. Apparently they estimate the largest observed flare to be an X45.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flare

Section 4.5 is what your looking for.