Sun ID: 11905

Space Weather Imagery of June 22 - 23, 2015 Events

Released on June 23, 2015

The sun emitted a CME and mid-level solar flare, peaking at 2:23 p.m. EDT, on June 22, 2015. Again on June 25, 2015, a mid-level solar flare peaked at 4:16 a.m. EDT.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

To see how this event may affect Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings.

This first flare is classified as an M6.6 flare and the second was M7.9. M-class flares are a tenth the size of the most intense flares, the X-class flares. The number provides more information about its strength. An M2 is twice as intense as an M1, an M3 is three times as intense, etc.

A view of multiple CMEs which erupted from the Sun in the latter half of June 2015. Their trajectories, and potential impacts on Earth and space assets, are propagated with the Enlil model.

View of a CME on June 20, 2015 from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. Earth-directed CMEs like this one are often called halo CMEs, because the material shooting off from the sun looks like a ring around the disk of the sun. This halo can be seen more clearly in the right-hand image called a difference image, which is created by subtracting two consecutive frames to see how the image has changed. Credit: NASA/SOHO

View of the June 20, 2015 CME from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. Earth-directed CMEs like this one are often called halo CMEs, because the material shooting off from the sun looks like a ring around the disk of the sun. This halo can be seen more clearly in the right-hand image called a difference image, which is created by subtracting two consecutive frames to see how the image has changed. Credit: NASA/SOHO

View of the June 22, 2015 CME from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. Earth-directed CMEs like this one, which started at 2:36 pm EDT on June 22, are often called halo CMEs, because the material shooting off from the sun looks like a ring around the disk of the sun. This halo can be seen more clearly in the right-hand image called a difference image, which is created by subtracting two consecutive frames to see how the image has changed. Credit: NASA/SOHO

For More Information

NASA.gov

Credits

Genna Duberstein (USRA): Producer
Scott Wiessinger (USRA): Producer
C. Alex Young (NASA/GSFC): Scientist
Sarah Frazier (ADNET Systems, Inc.): Science Writing Fellow

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center