Monster Sunspot Turns Toward Earth - Largest In More Than 20 Years

The solar eclipse may steal the week’s heavenly headlines, but a monster sunspot-the likes of which hasn’t been seen for more than years-has turned toward Earth and may spew some serious solar storms.
From the moment the gigantic sunspot cluster known as AR 2192 appeared on the eastern side of the sun on October 17, NASA solar scientists knew it was going to be a whopper. As it has rotated into view over the past few days, it has grown larger and is now the size of the planet Jupiter-around 87,000 miles (140,000 kilometers) across.
Amateur astronomers have been wowed by a vast sunspot that has rotated to face Earth, the largest since this solar cycle began in 2008, and solar observatories (on the ground and orbiting Earth) are closely monitoring the region.
So far, none of the flares have generated any significant solar storms, but scientists say that if any X-class flares pop up in the coming days, a giant cloud of charged particles known as a coronal mass ejection might head for Earth.
Interestingly, this month marks the 11 year anniversary of the Hallowe’en Solar Storms. In 2003, through October and November, a series of flares and CMEs struck Earth generating vast aurorae and causing damage to satellites. Aircraft were advised not to travel through polar regions (due to the high-altitude uptick in radiation and possible communications outages) and astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station had to shelter inside well-shielded portions of the orbiting outpost. Parts of Sweden even experienced short power outages due to atmospheric currents overloading the national grid.
spaceweather space weather sunspot sun sunspots solar flare flares wind storm astronomy geomagnetic northern lights northernlight northern light Aurora Borealis Australis AR2192