November 6, 2011 - Just three days ago, an extremely large sunspot burped out a solar flare that shot out coronal mass ejection (CME) of charged particles at near-light speed. We were lucky that the CME missed us. But there is new concern that our luck might not hold out forever.The sunspot is in a part of the Sun called "Active Region 1339." The sunspot itself is called "Sunspot AR1339" after the region it occupies. It is 8.3 times larger than Earth. It is on the side of the Sun that currently faces Earth. It's huge already, but it continues to grow. The sunspot is about 40,000 km wide and at over 80,000 in length, reports UniverseToday.com.
"The Solar Dynamics Observatory team," says UniverseToday, "called Active Region 1339 a 'Bad Boy,' as at 20:27 UTC [on 3 Nov. 2011], a solar flare peaked at X1.9. X-class flares are massive, and can be major events that can trigger planet-wide radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms."
According to NASA, it's the most active part of the Sun since 2005.
As the sunspot in Region 1339 continues to grow, the fear of a direct hit on Earth by a CME worries some. A hit from a solar flare's CME could knock out satellites and power grids, plunging many millions of people into darkness and disrupting communications, banking and air traffic. "If a major threat becomes real," reports the Washington Post, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) "will be able to provide a few days advance notice of the possibility but only a few hours at most that the threat is about to become the reality."
