For this week's APOD, I chose the picture called X-Class Flare. It is a picture of a very powerful explosion on the Sun that occurred on Valentines Day, but was updated on February 17, 2011.
X-class flares are very large. They are major events that can trigger planet-wide radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms. This particular flare happened to be the biggest flare so far in Solar Cycle 24. Solar Dynamics Observatory was able to give us this extreme ultraviolet image, where they successfully captured the flare occurring. The flare is said to have erupted from AR1158, one of the active regions in the Sun's southern hemisphere. Active regions are areas on the Sun where groups of sunspots lie. The flare is an intense burst of radiation, which temporarily overwhelmed pixels in the observatory's detectors, which caused the vertical streak on the lower right half of the Sun in the picture. The flare wasn't the only thing that happened on the Sun that day. A coronal mass ejection also occurred, which is a huge cloud of charged particles traveling outward at about 900 kilometers per second. Basically, erupting filaments are lifting off of the active solar surface and blasting enormous bubbles of magnetic plasma into space. Aurora were said to have occurred later that night.
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