
Originally Posted by
MrBiddle
What's a solar flare?
a solar flare, in which a small area above the solar surface suddenly roars to tens of millions of degrees, throwing off a surge of radiation that can cause communications blackouts, disable satellites, etc... The other event is a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), in which billions of tons of charged particles escape from the Sun's halo, the corona, at millions of miles an hour. When these reach Earth, they squash the magnetic field lines and dump trillions of watts of power into Earth's upper atmosphere thus overloading power lines, causing massive blackouts and destroy delicate instruments on anything in Earth orbit.... The fourth most powerful flare happend on October 2003