NASA Space Alerts

It’s #SunDay! Here’s your space weather report for Oct. 30-Nov. 5: •1 M-class flare •0 C-class flares •11 coronal mass ejections •1 geomagnetic storm This video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the week’s activity. After a quiet stretch, the Sun woke up at the very end of this reporting period. Active region AR14566 rotated into view on the southeastern limb (lower left) around Nov. 3. Within about a day, its magnetic field had tangled into a complex arrangement that tends to produce strong flares. On Nov. 5, AR14566 fired an M3.5 flare, the week’s strongest, along with a coronal mass ejection (not readily visible in this view) that sped away at about 2 million mph (915 km/s). The flare appears as a bright flash at about 2:59 in the video, to the left of and just below the Sun’s center. We’ll be watching this region as it crosses the Sun in the coming days. More about solar storms and flares: go.nasa.gov/3Naeuv9