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The sun’s solar flare activity appears to be hotting up: a massive X-Class solar flare erupted early on Sunday (Oct. 19) from a huge sunspot, and astronomers fear that this could just be the beginning of a spate of sizeable flares.

Solar flares are explosions of energetic radiation that can have potentially devastating effects on our communication systems, causing radio blackouts and affecting satellite measurements. Flares are categorised into three types, with grade C being the least powerful, grade M a medium-level flare, and grade X being the most powerful of all. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft captured images of the latest huge flare which was classified as a formidable X1.1.
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The world’s media has been awash recently with news of a cosmic near-miss a couple of years ago that could have spelled disaster for planet Earth.

Physicists have released details of a solar storm that occurred on July 23rd, 2012, along with the disturbing fact that, had the storm occurred just one week earlier, Earth would have been directly in the line of fire.

“I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado said in a NASA Science online release. “If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire.”
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It has long been recognised that birds use the Earth’s magnetic field (MF) for navigational purposes, but a recent study published in Frontiers in Zoology has uncovered a rather more unexpected animal response to this enigmatic MF energy.

It transpires that, when they stoop to poop, dogs prefer to align their bodies to the north-south axis of the Earth as signified by the geomagnetic field.

What the study did not manage to determine was why dogs choose to do this, but after observing 70 dogs of different 37 breeds 1,893 times during defecation, the scientists were able to confirm with some confidence that "dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm MF conditions." read more

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As if we needed any more factors to influence our already unpredictable weather, scientists are now concerned about the lack of activity on the sun, which appears to have diminished significantly.

The periodic changes in the sun’s activity, such as changes in levels of solar radiation, coronal mass ejections and solar flares, are known as the solar magnetic activity cycle. These variations, which can affect space weather and the Earth’s climate, have been noted to occur in eleven year cycles for hundreds of years. At this point in the cycle there should be a solar maximum, but space physicists have revealed that,conversely, activity is worryingly low.
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