Added 1 new A* page:Did you know where in the middle of the strongest solar storm since 2005? Well it's true, according to that there article. But it isn't exactly causing telegraph stations to burst into flame as far as I know, so presumably we'll survive. Here's a video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory of one of the flares that presumably shot some of the Sun-stuff our way:
video on Youtube
That's only an M8.7 flare, which is kinda biggish relatively speaking, but almost ten times weaker than the X6.9 flare we had last summer, for instance, and twenty times weaker than the X17 flare seen in last big storm, the one in 2005. And the biggest flare ever measured with modern instruments, according to Wikipedia, was a 2003 flare clocking in at a meaty X28--but that was actually just the maximum amount the monitoring instrument at the time could measure, and analysis of that flare's effects suggest it could have been up around an X45; still didn't burn down telegraph offices like the "Carrington Super Flare" in the Solar Superstorm of 1859, which could be seen by the naked eye (!) (and not that you should look at the Sun directly anyway!), so I guess maybe even the X-scale of solar flares isn't all that. Would they have needed a new scale (Z??) for the flare Carrington saw?
Still, with all the flares over the weekend or so this is the biggest sustained storm the SDO--which is only about two years old--has been able to watch (and film) with its mighty instruments, so you can't blame them for hyping it a bit!
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