Predicting the Sun's Most Violent Outbursts
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In the first four days of February this year the Sun unleashed six powerful X-class flares in rapid succession including an X8.1 that was the strongest in several years. And now, scientists have announced a new forecasting system that could give us up to a year's warning before the most dangerous solar storms arrive. The extraordinary thing is that the system has already been proved right by eruptions nobody knew about until after the forecast was made.
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Predicting the Sun's Most Violent Outbursts By Mark Thompson - March 02, 2026 09:38 AM UTC | Solar Astronomy The Sun is trying to tell us something. In the first four days of February this year, it unleashed six powerful X-class solar flares in rapid succession including one classified X8.1, the strongest in several years. For most of us, that meant some disrupted radio signals, some spectacular aurora displays, and a reminder that our nearest star is not the steady, reliable lamp we sometimes take for granted. For solar physicists, it was confirmation that we are deep inside one of the most dangerous periods the Sun has produced in a generation. Solar flares come in several classes. The most powerful, the super flares or S-class events are those classified above X10. A direct hit from one of these on a populated part of Earth could cause widespread power outages, disable satellites, knock out GPS navigation, and expose airline passengers at high latitudes to significant radiation. They are rare but they are real, and until recently there was almost no way to predict them more than a few hours in advance. Artist's impression of a GPS Block IIIA satellite in orbit (Credit : U. S. Air Force) That has now changed thanks to a multinational team led by Victor Velasco Herrera of the National Autonomous University of Mexico that has developed the first forecasting system capable of identifying windows of elevated super flare risk months to a year ahead of time. They can even pinpoint which regions of the Sun are most likely to be the source. The research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, is built on fifty years of X-ray observations collected by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites between 1975 and 2025. Trawling through that half century of data, the team discovered two previously unknown rhythmic cycles buried within the Sun's behaviour, one repeating every 1.7 years, another every seven years. Both are tied to the way ma...
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