A new large spot has appeared on the Sun and it looks scary

Published 17.06.2024 | By Йосиф

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A new large spot has appeared on the Sun and it looks scary

spaceweather.com: Just a few days ago, sunspot AR3712 did not exist. It is now 8 times wider than the Earth and is growing rapidly.

Yesterday in Austria, Michael Karrer photographed this frightening formation crackling with activity:

Carrère’s photograph shows hot streams of plasma flowing up and down the massive ridge of the sunspot. Several hot spots are “Ellerman bombs”—magnetic explosions each with the power of about 100,000 World War II atomic bombs.

Sunspot magnetograms show a magnetic field of mixed polarity, in which the north (+) and south (-) poles collide with each other. Magnetic reconnection could soon trigger an X-class solar flare. Any such eruption this weekend would be geoeffective as the sunspot turns directly toward Earth.

The Big The One Editor’s Comment: The strange shape and growth rate of the sunspot AR3712 immediately inspired the internet to come up with a creative that explains everything:

However, a more serious creative explains everything a little differently:

As you can see, the solar atmosphere is very different in size from what was observed three or four years ago.

The so-called supergranulation looks even more scary now – the tops of local contagion pillars at the base of the photosphere, each with a diameter of 20-30 thousand kilometers:

Until relatively recently, these supergranules were partly controversial because they were observed rather poorly and only in a special spectrum. But today, without much progress in optics, astronomers see them very clearly, as if some clouds crowding on the surface of the star’s convection zone. This allows us to think that the convection cells are being pressed by something from the depths and any of them can explode in a solar flare.

Will the AR3712 screw up or not? The question is not for us, since in the public we see only a thousandth of the information available to NASA. In the short term, everything looks very calm:

We wrote above about the long-term perspective, so we’ll keep an eye on developments.

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