Astronomers have been observing the Sun for centuries, but strong flares have not yet been predicted. Therefore, the fact that scientists are now warning about a possible outbreak in advance looks somewhat strange.
“There is an incredible-looking sunspot in the center of the sun’s disk, and a large new dark core has just appeared on the limb,” says Illinois astronomer Apollo Lasky, who photographed the bubbling starscape:
The hotspots in Lasky’s video are mostly new. They either appeared for the first time, or increased dramatically in size in just a weekend.
One such area is sunspot AR3055. It is truly amazing, stretching over 100,000 km from end to end with more than a dozen dark cores. It almost directly faces the Earth and poses a threat of strong flares.
The last serious flare occurred on the Sun on July 9:
The flare received an X-class status, which is the highest rating among solar flares. In terms of numbers, astronomers are undecided and argue between X3 or X4, which is not a very big difference. The spot that gave rise to the erruption did not look at all away from the Earth and did not pose a particular threat. However, now a peculiar seething event is staring directly at the Earth and, according to the officials, is behaving strangely.
Huge filaments of magnetism
“Several huge filaments of magnetism are formed there,” says François Rouviere, who sent this photo from Cannes, France.
These structures are irregular tubes of magnetism that hold plasma masses above the surface of the Sun. They appear dark as they are colder than the star below them. However, if you could lift one of these tubes from the Sun and hold it in the sky like a torch, it would glow much brighter than the full moon.
It is no exaggeration to say that magnetic tubes are huge.
“It’s crazy,” says astrophotographer Martin Wise of Trenton, Florida. “This object is over one light-second long.”
Solar magnetic filaments are known to be unstable. However, they somehow retain their structure for several days. If one of these things ends up blowing up, the debris could very well fly back to Earth.
Solar filaments are actually ordinary solar prominences, but only observed from a different angle. When the plasma is ejected from the edge of the Sun, we see it as a prominence, but when the prominence is ejected in our direction, it is a filament. And now they look pretty gloomy.
The Sun is preparing for its most active period of the solar cycle (July 2025) and is showing extraordinary activity quite early.
Real preppers don’t need scientific warnings about possible solar flares, they are always ready for such a turn, and therefore every morning, when they wake up, they are only slightly surprised that the world hasn’t collapsed overnight.
Nevertheless, it is probably better to always know in advance about what may soon create a big bang on the Sun.
