Detected and captured by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft The largest flare of this solar cycle Starting from the same region as the other less powerful regions that reached Earth in May.
By capturing Sun from all sidesThe space mission, led by the European Space Agency (ESA), is revealing how active sunspot regions form and persist, which could help improve space weather forecasting.
Over the weekend of May 10-12, 2024, the largest solar storm to hit Earth in over 20 years swept across our planet. It created an intensity Geomagnetic stormIt produces beautiful auroras that light up the sky at much lower latitudes than usual.
All Formed in an active sunspot region called AR3664. As it orbited outside of Earth’s line of sight on May 14, it released an even stronger eruption (class X8.79), causing a major radio blackout on Earth.
But it was not the strongest flare on record in that solar system. On May 20, the STIX X-ray instrument The Solar Orbiter observed the far side of the Sun A large flare of an estimated class of X12 and it expanded in the opposite direction to Earth.
“It does The strongest flare of the current solar cycle and one of the ten strongest since 1996,” ESA researcher Laura Hayes says in a statement.
Flames Class They are the highest type of solar flares and the larger the number after X, the more intense it is.
Most work studying the Sun looks at the Earth-facing side, but The Solar Orbiter takes a different route throughout the solar system. Because of the way the spacecraft moves relative to Earth, the Solar Orbiter is currently observing the far side of the Sun for more than four months.
“The state of Solar Orbiter, combined with other missions observing the Sun from the Earth’s side, gives us a 360-degree view of the Sun over long periods of time. This will only happen three more times in the Solar Orbiter’s future, so we are in a unique position to observe distant active regions that orbit within the Earth’s line of sight. ESA.
As soon as this happens May 20 burnThe Solar Orbiter’s Energetic Particle Detector (EPD) detected an increase in ions at tens of kilometers per second and electrons moving near the speed of light.
Coinciding with the timing of this event, the computers aboard BepiColombo and Mars Express (two of ESA’s planetary missions) have a A large increase in the number of memory errorsIt could be caused by energetic solar particles hitting body memory cells inside the spacecraft.
Olivier Witasse, project scientist Mars ExpressNotes: “This engineering data is intended to track the position of the spacecraft, but shows that it can also be used to detect space weather events, which are unpredictable.”
Shortly thereafter, Métis coronagraph The Solar Orbiter observed how the Sun sent the call A “coronal mass ejection” and the MAG magnetometer observed its arrival on the spacecraft a few minutes later.
An enormous bubble of plasma is formed by a few moving charged particles 3 million km/s, caused large fluctuations in the magnetic field measured on the spacecraft. Even the ESA/NASA SOHO mission ejected more material from the Sun than was visible from Earth.
These different data sets make it possible to track the movement of the particles and electromagnetic fields of this massive explosion. throughout the solar system. This helps improve the accuracy of simulations of solar activity.
