solar flare tagged posts

New observations reveal how solar flares really ignite—and why they can be so powerful. Solar Orbiter has captured the clearest evidence yet that a solar flare grows through a cascading “magnetic avalanche.” Small, weak magnetic disturbances rapidly multiplied, triggering stronger and stronger explosions that accelerated particles to extreme speeds. The process produced streams of glowing plasma blobs that rained through the Sun’s atmosphere long after the flare itself.

Much like a snow avalanche that starts with a small shift before cascading downhill, new observations show that solar flares begin with subtle magnetic disturbances that rapidly intensify...

The first building blocks of life on Earth may have formed thanks to eruptions from our sun, a new study finds.

A series of chemical experiments show how solar particles, colliding with gases in Earth’s early atmosphere, can form amino acids and carboxylic acids, the basic building blocks of proteins and organic life. The findings were published in the journal Life.

To understand the origins of life, many scientists try to explain how amino acids, the raw materials from which proteins and all cellular life, were formed...

A solar radio burst with a signal pattern, akin to that of a heartbeat, has been pinpointed in the Sun’s atmosphere, according to a new study.

In findings published in the journal Nature Communications, an international team of researchers has reported uncovering the source location of a radio signal coming from within a C-class solar flare more than 5,000 kilometers above the Sun’s surface.

Researchers say the study’s findings could help scientists better understand the physical processes behind the energy release of solar flares – the solar system’s most powerful explosions.

“The discovery is unexpected,” said Sijie Yu, the...

A new study offers direct evidence showing where near-light speed particle acceleration occurs inside the largest explosion known in the solar system, the solar flare.

Solar flares are among the most violent explosions in our solar system, but despite their immense energy — equivalent to a hundred billion atomic bombs detonating at once — physicists still haven’t been able to answer exactly how these sudden eruptions on the Sun are able to launch particles to Earth, nearly 93 million miles away, in under an hour.

Now, in a study published June 8 in Na...