All throughout the month of November, the Earth had to endure the ordeals of a large number of solar storms. Luckily, these disturbances from the Sun were not too powerful and did not cause much damage. However, that might soon change. The NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a satellite which has been tasked with observing the Sun, has observed a frightening development. A big sunspot has emerged on the Sun which can explode and cause a powerful solar storm on Earth. If such a large sunspot exploded, the resultant solar storm can have catastrophic consequences. Read on to know whether we should be worried or not.
The recent development was reported by SpaceWeather.com which stated, “A new sunspot is emerging over the sun's southeastern limb, and it appears to be a big one. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is monitoring multiple dark cores as they creep over the horizon”.
The last sunspot to emerge on the Sun was AR3141 which was considered to be unstable but it never exploded while it was facing the Earth. This sunspot is larger than that and is capable of throwing huge bursts of coronal mass ejection (CME) towards the Earth. Even if it is not as intense as the Carrington event, it can still cause a G5-class solar storm which will not only damage satellites and disrupt wireless communications such as internet services, mobile network and GPS, it can also cause power grid failures and even disrupt electronics such as heart pacemakers on Earth.
However, there is no need to panic as we do not know whether an explosion can or cannot happen. The SpaceWeather.com report stated, “It is premature to evaluate the flare potential of this severely foreshortened sunspot group”. While we do not have a technology that can predict the
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