A Whole Lot Happening on the Sun – In Many Types of Light

X2.3 flare! AR11875 on the west limb let out a big one. An X2.3 peaked at 21:54 in GOES X-ray. Here is a snapshot of the flare captured in SDO/AIA 94 angstrom. credit: NASA/SDO

The sun has been really active lately. SDO gives us an amazing view of this activity in many different wavelengths of light.

This also shows us the sun’s atmosphere in many temperatures ranging from ~4500 Kelvin or 7600 degrees Fahrenheit to over 20 million Kelvin or 36 million Fahrenheit.

This video shows 8 of SDO’s 10 wavelengths, 1700, 1600, 304, 193, 211, 335, 94 and 131 angstroms.

There is a lot of interesting activity including several connected events from and between the active regions on or near the West limb or right side of the sun.

These events also had several CMEs. The CMEs are included in the list below which shows all observed CMEs greater than 500 km/s both Earth and non-Earth directed.

For a period of about 48 hours, 00:30 10/28/2013 to 00:31 10/30/2013, the sun produced 6 M-class flares and 2 X-class flares from 3 different sunspot groups our active regions. The events were:

date start time end time peak time class location active region
2013-10-28 01:41:00 02:12:00 02:03:00 X1.0 N05W72 1875
2013-10-28 04:32:00 04:46:00 04:41:00 M5.1 N08W72 1875
2013-10-28 11:32:00 12:39:00 11:53:00 M1.4 S14W46 1874
2013-10-28 14:00:00 14:12:00 14:05:00 M2.8 N08W78 1875
2013-10-28 14:46:00 15:04:00 15:01:00 M2.7 S08E27 1882
2013-10-28 15:07:00 15:21:00 15:15:00 M4.4 S06E28 1882
2013-10-28 20:48:00 21:02:00 20:57:00 M1.5 N07W83 1875
2013-10-29 21:42:00 22:01:00 21:54:00 X2.3 N05W89 1875

This video shows 8 of SDO’s 10 wavelengths, 1700, 1600, 304, 193, 211, 335, 94 and 131 angstroms.

There is a lot of interesting activity including several connected events from and between the active regions on or near the West limb or right side of the sun.

These events also had several CMEs. The CMEs are included in the list below which shows all observed CMEs greater than 500 km/s both Earth and non-Earth directed.

CMEs greater than 500 km/s:

Earth directed:
Starting time Speed (km/s) Type Direction (LON/LAT in HEEQ) Half-Angle width (degrees) Detecting spacecraft (real-time)
2013-10-28T02:12Z ~ 625 C 65/7 60 SOHO, STEREO A,B
2013-10-28T15:48Z ~ 900 C -10/20 28 SOHO

Non-Earth directed:
Starting time Speed (km/s) Type Direction (LON/LAT in HEEQ) Half-Angle width (degrees) Detecting spacecraft (real-time)
2013-10-28T04:48Z ~ 750 C 73/15 55 SOHO, STEREO A,B
2013-10-28T12:12Z ~ 600 C 83/10 20 SOHO and STEREO A
2013-10-28T14:12Z ~1100 O 80/27 35 SOHO
2013-10-28T16:36Z ~ 525 C 70/6 15 SOHO
2013-10-28T21:16Z ~ 574 C 83/22 25 SOHO and STEREO A

credit: NASA/SDO/helioviewer/SWRC