New Striking Video of Major Solar Flare

One of the most spectacular solar flares has been recorded on film with extreme details by the Japanese Hinode satellite and helped scientists see what's behind the colossal eruption.

A solar flare is a violent explosion in the Sun's atmosphere with an energy equivalent to a billion megatons, traveling normally at about 1 million km per hour (about 0.05% the speed of light), though sometimes much faster. The flares have been known to affect the electro transmission of many earthly communication devices including computers, cell phones, pagers, GPS and automobiles. Solar flares take place in the solar corona and chromosphere, heating plasma to tens of millions of kelvins and accelerating the resulting electrons, protons and heavier ions to near the speed of light and hurling them into space.

Erupting from a sunspot known as "930", - cooler regions of the sun's surface where magnetic energy caps the superheated material below - the flare has been observed and produced a striking video recorded by Hinode, that can spot solar details as small as 90 miles wide, even though it's 93 million miles from the sun.

They produce electromagnetic radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum at all wavelengths from long-wave radio to the shortest wavelength gamma rays. Most flares occur around sunspots, where intense magnetic fields emerge from the Sun's surface into the corona. The energy efficiency associated with solar flares may take several hours or even days to build up, but most flares take only a matter of minutes to release their energy.

Above the sunspots, lines of magnetic force are stretched and twisted until they reach a maximum tension, and then a violent explosion takes place, similar to what happens when you stretch and twist a rubber band to its breaking point. Magnetic fields behave a lot like rubber bands, and Hinode was able to see the twisting and stretching that preceded the solar flare.

This particular flare was an X-3. All X-flares are major, with higher numbers indicated greater releases of energy. This one created a coronal mass ejection, or giant expanding bubble of charged particles. The CME interacted with Earth's magnetic field to produce Polar Auroras (Northern Lights) as far south as Arizona.

The data obtained from Hinode is just what astronomers need to sort out how flares work. Hinode is poised to help researchers unravel remaining mysteries about how solar flares and storms work, but the Sun is in a low period of activity in its 11-year cycle.

So, all they need now is some more explosions, and they're eagerly waiting for the next solar flare cycle, that will reach its peak around 2011-2012.