Sun's fury: Strongest solar flares captured by Nasa

Nasa's solar dynamics observatory captured solar flares, visible as a bright flash. The images show different wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light, each highlighting varying temperatures of solar material. Scientists analyse these images to understand the movement of solar matter and energy during a flare. (Photo: Nasa)

Captured by Nasa's solar dynamics observatory, an X-class solar flare burst from the edge of the sun on March 7, 2012.

The image reveals extreme ultraviolet light, which is invisible to the human eye. (Photo: Nasa)

A coronal mass ejection erupts from the sun and head towards Earth. Two to four days later, the CME cloud hits and is mostly deflected by Earth's magnetosphere. The blue lines extending from Earth's poles depict its magnetic field lines.

The magnetic plasma cloud, up to 30 million miles wide, can disrupt communications, damage satellites, and cause blackouts. (Photo: Nasa)

Nasa's solar dynamics observatory captured satellite imagery of the Sun in ultraviolet light, colourized in light brown. The picture shows dark patches known as coronal holes are visible on the Sun’s surface. These regions are where fast solar winds stream out into space. (Photo: Nasa)

Captured by SDO, the image shows the sun releasing a mid-level solar flare. Solar flares are intense bursts of radiation, but their harmful rays cannot penetrate Earth's atmosphere to impact humans directly.

However, if sufficiently strong, they can disrupt the atmospheric layer where GPS and communication signals are transmitted. (Photo: Nasa)

This composite image of the Sun shows high-energy X-rays from Nasa's NuSTAR in blue, lower-energy X-rays from Japan's Hinode mission in green, and ultraviolet light from Nasa's SDO in red.

NuSTAR's limited field of view required 25 images, taken in June 2022, to cover the Sun. The high-energy X-rays are visible only in regions with the hottest material in the Sun's atmosphere. (Photo: Nasa)

A significant solar explosion in 2023 caused a radio blackout affecting parts of the United States and the Pacific Ocean. This event originated from a sunspot nearly seven times the width of Earth and was observed by Nasa’s SDO, a spacecraft dedicated to continuously monitoring the Sun. The observatory captured an image of the explosion. (Photo: Nasa)

This magnetic map was generated using the potential field source surface (PFSS) model, which simulates the magnetic field in the Sun's atmosphere based on surface magnetic measurements.

The base image was captured in extreme ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 171 angstroms, which is invisible to the human eye but is depicted here in gold. (Photo: Nasa)

A long solar filament erupted on December 6, 2010, after winding around the Sun. STEREO (Behind) captured the event in extreme ultraviolet light.

The filament had been visible for over two weeks before it rotated out of view. These cooler gas clouds, suspended by magnetic forces, are unstable and often detach from the Sun. (Photo: Nasa)

This image was taken in February 2015, when the Sun emitted a coronal mass ejection and a portion of a solar filament over three hours.

While some strands fell back into the Sun, a significant part of the filament surged into space as a bright cloud of particles, observed by the SOHO spacecraft in extreme ultraviolet light. (Photo: Nasa)

In March 2013, a dark area was seen on the sun’s surface, just above and to the right of the center of this image from Nasa's solar dynamics observatory, a coronal hole. This region is a source of fast solar wind emanating from the sun. (Photo: Nasa)