Giant sunspot could cause solar flares on Earth

Today’s partial solar eclipse isn’t the only sun-related noteworthy event. A giant sunspot has the potential to spew solar flares strong enough to cause problems on Earth through early next week.

Sunspot AR2192 is about 10 times the diameter of Earth and already has disrupted some radio systems that use the upper atmosphere.

On Wednesday morning, a solar flare temporarily blacked out a few radar and communication systems used primarily by planes, boats and amateur radio operators.

As of mid-morning October 23, the sunspot was bigger than one from Oct. 2003 that spawned solar storms strong enough to interfere with GPS accuracy and airplane navigation, disrupt some communications and change the magnetic direction in Alaska by more than 20 degrees briefly.

Activity from that 2003 sunspot also forced electric-power grid operators in North America to take action to prevent blackouts, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Sunspots are “kind of like giant storage batteries for magnetic energy on the sun,” says Naval Observatory Public Affairs Officer Geoff Chester.

When too much energy builds up in a sunspot, it can blast an X-ray flare that’s sometimes accompanied by a Coronal Mass Ejection in which material is blown off the surface of the sun.

When blasts of X-rays and charged particles are pointing toward Earth, each has the potential to create problems for orbiting satellites and earthbound systems in their own way.

But the news isn’t all bad. There’s also the potential for far-reaching auroral activity.

“You might have a display of Northern Lights that would be visible from possibly even down here,” Chester says referring to the Metropolitan Washington area. “Now it would have to be a really big solar flare, but this sunspot does have the potential to do that.”

The currently active sunspot also presents the potential for solar storm worst case scenarios. As recently as March 1989, a solar storm wiped out the power grid in Quebec, Canada, putting about 3 million people in the dark.

Chester explains that event, saying that when the Earth’s magnetic field is in a particular configuration, a large Coronal Mass Ejection can induce currents in long distance transmission lines that can trip circuit breakers and take down a power network.

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