DOUBLE FLARE: Long ago researchers thought solar flares were isolated events. Magnetic fields above a single sunspot became unstable and exploded--end of story. The Solar Dynamics Observatorys global view of the sun has shown, however, that widely-separated sunspots can explode in tandem. Thats what happened on March 20th when AR2010 and AR2014 combined for a double flare: Transparent arcs of magnetism stretching across the 400,000 km divide between the two sunspots allow them to communicate magnetohydrodynamically, so instabilities in one can affect the other. This appears to be a textbook example of a sympathetic flare. The most famous example occurred on August 1, 2010. SDO watched as instabilities jumped vast distances from one sunspot to another, setting off a chain reaction that engulfed more than half the sun. Compared to that global eruption, todays double flare was puny--or as puny as two explosions more powerful than a billion nuclear bombs can be. Welcome to the sun.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 07:38:56 +0000
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