Turn, Turn, Turn! Explosion on Sun’s farside raises solar storm threat for Earth?
Just a couple of days ago, the Earth suffered the Halloween-day solar storm attack from our Sun that appeared to have a scary smiley plastered on it face due to some dark spots emerging suddenly on its surface. These dark spots (also known as sunspots) are sites with extremely high magnetic fields which get destabilized and explode. This is how the coronal mass ejections (CME) get shot towards the Earth. While the dark spots are gone, worse news for our planet has come. A massive explosion on the farside of the Sun was seen earlier today. This new blast site, which could be a potentially unstable sunspot, is going to come into Earth's view in a week as the Sun turns on its axis. This has raised concerns for a dangerous solar storm strike on Earth soon.
The development was reported by SpaceWeather which noted on its website, “Something just exploded on the farside of the sun. The blast hurled a CME into space during the late hours of Oct. 31st…The blast site will rotate onto the Earthside of the sun about a week from now ”. The website also shared a short video of the moment the Sun exploded, which you can see here. You can also see Mercury on the right and Venus on the left. The gaseous material coming out from the explosion is the CME which causes solar storms.
As it is extremely difficult to gauge just how dangerous a sunspot is before we can see it, right now not much can be said about the explosion site on the far side of the Sun. However, considering the intensity of the explosion, the possible sunspot can be one of the largest we have seen this year. There are two possibilities at the moment. The first is that after the explosion, the sunspot has expelled most of the destabilizing magnetic fields. If that is the
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