NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center released a video over the weekend of an above-average solar flare captured by the agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
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The M-class flare was measured as a 6.5 on the scale that bottoms out at M1, while the most powerful X-class can be up to 10 times more-powerful than M.
While we can’t feel the physical effects of solar flares due to the Earth’s atmosphere, the large bursts of radiation that manifest themselves as flashes of light over the surface of the sun do have the potential to disrupt communications by penetrating to the atmospheric layer where signals are transmitted.
The flare occurred April 2, and is colored in both red and yellow at different points during the video.