The Sun's fury,
in real time.
Solar flares are the most powerful explosions in the solar system — magnetic energy stored above sunspots, released in minutes, arriving at Earth in eight. This is the live instrument panel: what the Sun is doing right now, where it's hitting Earth, and every great flare ever recorded. Live data from NOAA SWPC and NASA. Primary sources, zero hype.
The Sun, and where it hits Earth.
Left: the Sun and its active regions, the eruption scaled to the live X-ray flux. Right: a live globe — the sunlit hemisphere is where a flare's radiation lands, peaking at the sub-solar point.
Where the flare is hitting now.
Solar X-rays only reach the daylit half of Earth. The shaded lobe is the current radio-blackout footprint — brightest under the Sun, fading to the day/night line. Its intensity tracks the live flux.
GOES X-ray flux,
last 24 hours.
One-minute soft X-ray irradiance (1–8 Å) straight from NOAA's GOES satellite. Each band is a flare class. When the line crosses into M or X, Earth's sunlit side takes a radio hit.
How flares are classified.
By peak soft-X-ray brightness, on a logarithmic ladder. Each letter is ten times the one before it.
Three storms,
three yardsticks.
One eruption drives three different hazards, each with its own 1–5 scale: radio blackouts (R), radiation storms (S), and geomagnetic storms (G).
R · Radio blackouts
S · Radiation storms
G · Geomagnetic storms
One eruption,
three waves.
A flare is not a single event that reaches Earth all at once. Light comes first, particles next, and the plasma cloud days later — each with different effects.
X-rays and EUV slam the dayside ionosphere, ionizing the D and E layers. High-frequency radio is absorbed instead of reflected — the sudden ionospheric disturbance and HF blackout, plus prompt GPS/GNSS position errors. This is the R-scale, and it happens on the sunlit half of Earth only.
Solar energetic protons, guided along magnetic field lines, flood the polar caps — polar HF blackouts, satellite single-event upsets, solar-panel degradation, and a real radiation dose for astronauts and polar-route aircrews. This is the S-scale.
A coronal mass ejection — billions of tons of magnetized plasma — strikes the magnetosphere and drives the geomagnetic storm: brilliant auroras, ground-induced currents that stress power grids, and thermospheric heating that drags satellites down. This is the G-scale. Auroras and grid damage come from here, not the flare's light.
HF blackouts
Aviation, maritime, ham and emergency HF radio fade on the dayside. In Sept 2017 an X9.3 flare degraded the HF links used for Hurricane Irma and Maria relief in the Caribbean.
Satellite drag
Heating puffs up the upper atmosphere, raising drag in LEO. In Feb 2022 a merely moderate storm dragged down 38 of 49 freshly launched Starlink satellites before they could raise orbit.
Grids & GPS
Ground-induced currents can trip transformers — Québec lost power for 9 hours in 1989. In the May 2024 Gannon storm, RTK-GPS outages hit farm tractors mid-planting, costing affected farms around $17,000 each.
Every great storm,
1859 → now.
The events that defined space-weather history — from the telegraph-frying Carrington Event to the worldwide auroras of 2024. Red marks a record-class flare; green marks the modern era.
The most powerful flares
ever recorded.
Ranked by peak X-ray class since satellite monitoring began in 1975. Search or sort. Classic operational scale (see the note under the classification ladder).
4 November 2003 · the largest on record
Active region 10486 unleashed a flare so intense it saturated GOES detectors at X17.4; NOAA extrapolated X28, and independent ionospheric methods estimated up to X40–X45. It erupted as the region rotated off the Sun's western limb, so the worst of the blast missed Earth. The same region drove the Halloween Storms days earlier.
| # | Date | Peak class▾ | Region | Notes |
|---|
Flares in the last 7 days.
Pulled live from NOAA's GOES flare log. A green CME tag means the flare launched a coronal mass ejection — watch for a geomagnetic storm 1–3 days later.
The ones we only see in the trees.
Long before satellites, monster solar particle storms left spikes of carbon-14 in tree rings and beryllium-10 in ice. These "Miyake events" dwarf anything in the instrument era.
The strongest known
The most intense solar particle event ever detected — roughly 18% stronger than AD 774, and on the order of 500× the strongest modern (2005) particle storm.
The archetype
A carbon-14 spike about 20× normal variability — an estimated 10× or more the particle fluence of the Carrington Event. Now used as a global tree-ring dating anchor.
The confirmed few
A handful of other extreme events are confirmed across tree rings and ice cores worldwide. A repeat today would threaten satellites, aviation dose and grids well beyond a Carrington scenario.
Where this comes from.
Live telemetry: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center — GOES X-ray flux, flare log, planetary Kp index, and active-region summary (services.swpc.noaa.gov). Flare catalog and CME linkage: NASA DONKI (api.nasa.gov). Imagery reference: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov). Historical record: NOAA SWPC, NOAA NCEI, the Australian Space Weather Service flare list, Hudson et al. 2023 (GOES saturation reanalysis), and the peer-reviewed literature on the Carrington, 1921, 1989, 2003, 2012, 2022 and 2024 events. Miyake-event data from cosmogenic-isotope studies (Miyake 2012 onward). The sub-solar point and day/night terminator are computed live from UTC — accurate to a fraction of a degree.