Sun Erupts With Mightiest Solar Flare In 4 years

MSNBC- The sun unleashed its strongest solar flare in four years Monday night, hurling a massive wave of charged particles from electrified gas into space and toward Earth.
The solar storm sent a flash of radiation that hit Earth in a matter of minutes. Now a huge cloud of charged particles is headed our way. These coronal mass ejections, as they are called, typically take about 24 hours or more to arrive. They can spark spectacular displays of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, at high latitudes and sometimes even into the northern United States.

The mega flare, which registered as a Class X2.2 flare on the scale of solar flares, was the first class X flare to occur in the new solar cycle of activity, which began last year. The sun is now ramping up toward a solar maximum around 2013.

"It has been the largest flare since Dec. 6, 2006, so a long time coming," said Phil Chamberlin, deputy project scientist for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which observed the flare. "There were some clues that led us to believe the likelihood of moderate to large flares (M class or above) could occur, but we were all surprised when it actually happened to be a large X-class."

See also: Solar Flares Pound The Earth