Solar Flare, Ultraviolet, 171 ÌÉ, 2012
Twelve years after the Earth was buffeted by one of the more potent Sun storms in modern history, our nearest star crackled with activity again. A solar flare erupted on July 12, 2012, followed closely by a companion coronal mass ejection (CME), which is a cloud of magnetically charged particles and energy that can disturb Earth's magnetic field, disrupt satellites and ground-based electronics, and provoke auroras. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured this view of the flare in the Sun's southern hemisphere on July 12, 2012, showing a close-up view of the Sun at 171 Angstroms. The yellow false color was chosen by the science team to distinguish between the spectral bands. The flare was classified as , with X being the highest class of flares (A,B,C,M, and X). At 16:52 Universal Time (UTC) on July 12, the explosion launched a stream of particles toward Earth, where they arrived in the upper atmosphere just hours after the eruption. Several outlets reported minor disturbances to Global Positioning System signals and radio blackouts at high latitudes.
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Photo credit: © Photo Researchers / Alamy / Afripics
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Keywords: -class, -type, 21st, 24, 171, 2012, activity, angstroms, assembly, astronomical, astronomy, atmospheric, body, celestial, century, cycle, deep, dwarf, dynamics, eruption, false-color, filament, flare, g2v, heavenly, image, imaging, main, main-sequence, object, observatory, prominence, science, sdo, sequence, sky, solar, space, star, sun, surface, ultraviolet, , yellow, ÌÉ
