Sun fires trio of solar flares into space

NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) image shows several large sunspots(almost white areas) crossing the face of the Sun. Photo: AFP/NASA

These latest flares carried enough electrically charged particles to cause concern for some satellite operators on Earth, but are likely to have less impact on our planet than last week's huge solar storms.

That is because the storms that hit Earth last Wednesday and Thursday, some of the most intense ever detected, were aimed right at our planet. The latest storms are not.

By Monday, the giant region of sunspots that is spawning the flares had rotated far to the right edge of the circle of sun that is pointed at Earth, which means any flares it generates will go off into space.

But they may still produce auroras that will be visible in Earth's temperate middle latitudes, according to scientists monitoring the SOHO spacecraft that keeps watch over solar weather.

This particular spate of space weather springs from a sprawling cluster of sunspots 200,000 miles across that has been slowly moving across the surface of the sun that we can see for the last two weeks.

Sunspots frequently cause solar flares and their more disturbing offspring, coronal mass ejections, but this sunspot group is atypical, said Aad van Ballegooijen, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Most sunspot groups are bipolar, with positive and negative charges clashing and producing charged particles that sometimes find their way to Earth.