The space agency has also shared a video of the increased movement on the Sun’s surface which culminated in one of the active regions releasing a big solar flare on 28 October.

These solar flares do not pose an immediate threat to us, at least those who are within the Earth’s atmosphere. According to NASA, harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground. However, the agency claims that when the flare is intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

In terms of intensity, the space agency has classified the latest solar flare under the X-class, the most intense flares. And within the X-class, a numerical suffix denotes the intensity of the flare. The flare is categorized as an X1-class flare. The number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, and so on. Flares that are classified X10 or stronger are considered unusually intense.

NASA has claimed that this was the second X-class flare of Solar Cycle 25, which began in December 2019. A new solar cycle comes roughly every 11 years. NASA claims that over the course of each cycle, the Sun transitions from relatively calm to active and stormy, and then quiet again; at its peak, known as solar maximum, the Sun’s magnetic poles flip.

NASA’s fleet of Heliophysics missions keep an eye on the Sun and space to provide timely warnings and also to study the causes of such eruptions on the Sun. The fleet’s work is important as these flares have the capacity to impact astronauts and satellites outside Earth’s atmosphere

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