'Monolith' Object on Mars? You Could Call It That

'Monolith' Object on Mars? You Could Call It That - Amateur stargazers have discovered an intriguing object jutting out from the surface of Mars. The seemingly perfectly rectangular, upright structure, found in NASA images of the Red Planet, bears a striking resemblance to the monoliths planted on Earth and the moon by aliens in the classic sci-fi film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

The object in question was first spotted several years ago after being photographed by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA space probe; every so often, it garners renewed interest on the Internet. But is it unnatural — a beacon erected by aliens for mysterious reasons, and even more mysteriously paralleled in the imaginations of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, creators of "2001"? Or is this rock the work of nature?

'Monolith' Object on Mars? You Could Call It That (Image: NASA HiRISE; Arrow: thesun.co.uk)

According to Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, who processes many of the images taken during NASA's Mars missions, the object in question is no more than a roughly rectangular boulder.

The HiRISE camera that photographed it has a resolution of approximately 1 foot (30 centimeters) per pixel — impressive considering the 180-mile (300-kilometer) altitude from which it photographs the Martian surface, but not quite sharp enough to capture the cragginess of a mid-size boulder. "When your resolution is too low to fully resolve an object, it tends to look rectangular because the pixels in the image are squares. Any curve will look like a series of straight lines if you reduce your resolution enough," Hill told Life's Little Mysteries.

The location of the boulder at the bottom of a cliff near many other boulders suggests it broke off the cliff and tumbled to its current spot sometime in the distant past, Hill said. Such a perilous location is itself an argument against deliberate placement by aliens: "If I was going to build a monolith somewhere, that's the last place I would put it!" he said. "The debris falling from the cliff would cover it up pretty quickly, on geologic timescales."

Hill added that the height of the boulder is being exaggerated in the photo by a low sun angle. Photographed when the sun was near the horizon, the boulder casts an especially long shadow.

The ufologists aren't necessarily wrong in calling it a monolith — the word simply translates from Latin as "one stone." But this monolith isn't the masonry of Martians. ( LiveScience.com )

READ MORE - 'Monolith' Object on Mars? You Could Call It That

Did Nasa cover up mysterious 'orbs' that flew past shuttle mission? Newly uncovered video clearly shows unknown objects 'buzzing' Shuttle Atlantis

Did Nasa cover up mysterious 'orbs' that flew past shuttle mission? Newly uncovered video clearly shows unknown objects 'buzzing' Shuttle Atlantis - Orbs move around the shuttle, appearing to be in formation - Ground control dismiss them as 'reflections on the camera lens'

To the ground control commentator on Nasa’s live public feed, they’re merely ‘reflections on the camera lens’ – but the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis don’t sound so convinced.

A spooky YouTube video appears to show three ‘orbs’ moving slowly around the Atlantis, as it floats in orbit during a 2006 mission.

The footage, which is a segment of the feed, begins with one of the astronauts describing to ground control what they’re seeing.

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Does space junk fly in formation? Three 'orbs' were seen by Shuttle Atlantis crew members and footage of the objects has appeared on YouTube

The YouTube footage begins with the camera looking at the Atlantis cargo bay - but things soon take a turn for the strange

The unnamed crew member says: ‘It’s a structure that’s definitely not rigid. Doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen on the outside of the Shuttle, that’s for sure.’

He describes how the object ‘quickly moved to the nose of the orbiter, moving away at least 100 feet’.

For a few minutes nothing of note happens, but then at 4.45 the camera looks beyond the shuttle and focusses on three orbs that appear to be hovering in a triangular formation nearby.

The ground control commentator immediately passes them off as ‘reflections in the camera lens’ – but the shuttle crew members seem far less dismissive, with one confirming that they’re seeing ‘three or four objects’ and asking: ‘Can you confirm it’s just the one that’s moving?’

Mystery: Ground control ask the Atlantis crew members what they're seeing

Send off? The orbs appeared as the crew inspected the Shuttle before making a final descent

End of an era: Atlantis touched down at Nasa's Kennedy Space Center in Florida just before dawn on July 21, 2011, wrapping up the final mission of the 30-year space shuttle program

However, the footage, despite being mysterious, remains too indistinct for any conclusions to be drawn about whether E.T really was observing the shuttle mission.

Many YouTube users who’ve studied it firmly believe the crew are looking at space junk.

However, could E.T have been zooming around Seoul, recently?

A mysterious round white object was filmed whizzing around a passenger plane above the capital of South Korea on April 7.

The clip, which has also been uploaded to YouTube (see below), begins with the ‘craft’ at the bottom of the screen, keeping pace with the passenger plane.

But then it speeds up and rises in altitude before zipping off out of shot, just as the startled person filming it tries to zoom in for a closer look.

When the UFO accelerates he can be heard making some sort of exclamation, as if trying to draw someone’s attention to it.

Strange: The round, white UFO can be seen in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture

The video was uploaded by YouTube user ‘Crazybreakingnews’, who commented: ‘It looks a little bit strange and not really similar to the other videos. If it's really real and not a fake, it looks like a kind of military drone.’

Several YouTube users are convinced it’s a UFO of some sort, but others remain sceptical.

Psued0Name said: ‘When stabilised, it is easy to see what is going on with the video.

‘The edges of the UFO are not blurred like all of the other background objects, it seems like a separate effect from the background, and in fact you can see edge noise on the shape of the UFO indicating it's a fake.

‘It doesn't even look right if you start to look at it hard, especially slowed down frame by frame.’

User vicariousjojoe agreed, writing: ‘People, you should know by now what is fake and what's not. You can always tell by the way the camera moves and zooms.’

Possible UFO activity has recently been sighted much closer to home, with a star-gazer filming intriguing footage of a glowing UFO, which he says he spotted hovering over the Thames Estuary in February.

The man, identified only as Space999dude, recorded the phenomenon as he drove past the river at night, he said.

The mysterious, oval aircraft can be seen suspended in the air displaying several amber-gold lights of varying sizes. ( dailymail.co.uk )

READ MORE - Did Nasa cover up mysterious 'orbs' that flew past shuttle mission? Newly uncovered video clearly shows unknown objects 'buzzing' Shuttle Atlantis

Russian space probe crashes into Pacific

Russian space probe crashes into Pacific — A Russian space probe designed to boost the nation's pride on a bold mission to a moon of Mars has come down in flames, showering fragments into the south Pacific west of Chile's coast, officials said.

Pieces from the Phobos-Ground, which had become stuck in Earth's orbit, landed in water Sunday 1,250 kilometers (775 miles) west of Wellington Island in Chile's south, the Russian military Air and Space Defense Forces said in a statement carried by the country's news agencies.

The military space tracking facilities were monitoring the probe's crash, its spokesman Col. Alexei Zolotukhin said. Zolotukhin said the deserted ocean area is where Russia guides its discarded space cargo ships serving the International Space Station.

RIA Novosti news agency, however, cited Russian ballistic experts who said the fragments fell over a broader patch of Earth's surface, spreading from the Atlantic and including the territory of Brazil. It said the midpoint of the crash zone was located in the Brazilian state of Goias.

The $170 million craft was one of the heaviest and most toxic pieces of space junk ever to crash to Earth, but space officials and experts said the risks posed by its crash were minimal because the toxic rocket fuel on board and most of the craft's structure would burn up in the atmosphere high above the ground anyway.

Russia's space agency has adjusted its forecast for the crash of a failed spacecraft for Sunday, January, 15, 2012.. In this November 2011 file photo, the Zenit-2SB rocket with the Phobos-Ground probe blasts off from its launch pad at the Cosmodrome Baikonur, Kazakhstan. (AP Photo, File)

The Phobos-Ground was designed to travel to one of Mars' twin moons, Phobos, land on it, collect soil samples and fly them back to Earth in 2014 in one of the most daunting interplanetary missions ever. It got stranded in Earth's orbit after its Nov. 9 launch, and efforts by Russian and European Space Agency experts to bring it back to life failed.

Prof. Heiner Klinkrad, Head of The European Space Agency's Space Debris Office that was monitoring the probe's descent, said the craft didn't pose any significant risks.

"This one is way, way down in the ranking," he said in a telephone interview from his office in Berlin, adding that booster rockets contain more solid segments that may survive fiery re-entries.

Thousands of pieces of derelict space vehicles orbit Earth, occasionally posing danger to astronauts and satellites in orbit, but as far as is known, no one has ever been hurt by falling space debris.

Russia's space agency Roscosmos predicted that only between 20 and 30 fragments of the Phobos probe with a total weight of up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds) would survive the re-entry and plummet to Earth.

Klinkrad agreed with that assessment, adding that about 100 metric tons of space junk fall on Earth every year. "This is 200 kilograms out of these 100 tons," he said.

The Phobos-Ground weighed 13.5 metric tons (14.9 tons), and that included a load of 11 metric tons (12 tons) of highly toxic rocket fuel intended for the long journey to the Martian moon of Phobos and left unused as the probe got stranded in orbit around Earth.

Roscosmos said that all of the fuel will burn up on re-entry, a forecast Klinkrad said was supported by calculations done by NASA and the ESA. He said the craft's tanks are made of aluminum alloy that has a very low melting temperature, and they will burst at an altitude of more than 100 kilometers (60 miles).

The space era has seen far larger spacecraft crash. NASA's Skylab space station that went down in 1979 weighed 77 metric tons (85 tons) and Russia's Mir space station that de-orbited in 2001 weighed about 130 metric tons (143 tons). Their descent fueled fears around the world, but the wreckage of both fell far away from populated areas.

The Phobos-Ground was Russia's most expensive and the most ambitious space mission since Soviet times. Its mission to the crater-dented, potato-shaped Martian moon was to give scientists precious materials that could shed more light on the genesis of the solar system.

Russia's space chief has acknowledged the Phobos-Ground mission was ill-prepared, but said that Roscosmos had to give it the go-ahead so as not to miss the limited Earth-to-Mars launch window.

Its predecessor, Mars-96, which was built by the same Moscow-based NPO Lavochkin company, experienced an engine failure and crashed shortly after its launch in 1996. Its crash drew strong international fears because of around 200 grams of plutonium onboard. The craft eventually showered its fragments over the Chile-Bolivia border in the Andes Mountains, and the pieces were never recovered.

The worst ever radiation spill from a derelict space vehicle came in January 1978 when the nuclear-powered Cosmos 954 satellite crashed over northwestern Canada. The Soviets claimed the craft completely burned up on re-entry, but a massive recovery effort by Canadian authorities recovered a dozen fragments, most of which were radioactive.

The Phobos-Ground also contained a tiny quantity of the radioactive metal Cobalt-57 in one of its instruments, but Roscosmos said it poses no threat of radioactive contamination.

The spacecraft also carried a small cylinder with a collection of microbes as part of an experiment by the Pasadena, California-based Planetary Society that designed to explore whether they can survive interplanetary travel. The cylinder is attached to a capsule that was supposed to deliver Phobos ground samples back to Earth.

Igor Marinin, the editor of Russia's Novosti Kosmonavtiki magazine, said on Russia's NTV television that it would likely be destroyed.

Calls to Brazil's National Space Institute and also the Goias state security secretariat were not returned. There was no mention in the Brazilian press of any debris crashing in Brazilian territory. ( Associated Press )

READ MORE - Russian space probe crashes into Pacific

Russian space probe to crash to Earth within hours

Russian space probe to crash to Earth within hours — A failed Russian probe designed to travel to a moon of Mars but stuck in Earth orbit will come crashing down within hours, likely in a shower of fragments that survive the fiery re-entry.

The unmanned Phobos Ground is one of the heaviest and most toxic space derelicts ever to crash to Earth, but space officials and experts say the risks are minimal as its orbit is mostly over water and most of the probe's structure will burn up in the atmosphere anyway.

Russia's space agency Roscosmos said the Phobos-Ground will crash between 1750 and 1834 GMT (1:50 p.m. and 2:34 p.m. EST). It said the probe could come down anywhere along its orbit that would place it over southern Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, South America and Pacific. The rest of the world, including the U.S. and Canada, is outside the risk zone.

"The resulting risk isn't significant," said Prof. Heiner Klinkrad, Head of The European Space Agency's Space Debris Office that is monitoring the probe's descent.

He wouldn't say where exactly the probe may enter the atmosphere, but said that "most of Europe is excluded from an impact risk."

Russia's space agency has adjusted its forecast for the crash of a failed spacecraft for Sunday, January, 15, 2012.. In this November 2011 file photo, the Zenit-2SB rocket with the Phobos-Ground probe blasts off from its launch pad at the Cosmodrome Baikonur, Kazakhstan. (AP Photo, File)

Roscosmos predicts that only between 20 and 30 fragments of the Phobos probe with a total weight of up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds) will survive the re-entry and plummet to Earth.

Klinkrad agreed with that assessment, adding that about 100 metric tons of space junk fall on Earth every year. "This is 200 kilograms out of these 100 tons," he said.

Thousands of pieces of derelict space vehicles orbit Earth, occasionally posing danger to astronauts and satellites in orbit, but as far as is known, no one has ever been hurt by falling space debris.

The Phobos-Ground weighs 13.5 metric tons (14.9 tons), and that includes a load of 11 metric tons (12 tons) of highly toxic rocket fuel intended for the long journey to the Martian moon of Phobos. It has been left unused as the probe got stuck in orbit around Earth shortly after its Nov. 9 launch.

Roscosmos says all of the fuel will burn up on re-entry, a forecast Klinkrad said was supported by calculations done by NASA and the ESA. He said the craft's tanks are made of aluminum alloy that has a very low melting temperature, and they will burst at an altitude of more than 100 kilometers.

"These tanks are expected to release the fuel above 100 kilometers, and then the fuel is going to burn in the atmosphere and later the tanks are going to burn up themselves as well," Klinkrad said in a telephone interview from his office in Berlin.

The space era has seen far larger spacecraft to crash. NASA's Skylab space station that went down in 1979 weighed 77 metric tons (85 tons) and Russia's Mir space station that de-orbited in 2001 weighed about 130 metric tons (143 tons). Their descent fueled fears around the world, but the wreckage of both fell far away from populated areas.

The $170-million Phobos-Ground was Russia's most expensive and the most ambitious space mission since Soviet times. The spacecraft was intended to land on the crater-dented, potato-shaped Martian moon, collect soil samples and fly them back to Earth, giving scientists precious materials that could shed more light on the genesis of the solar system.

Russia's space chief has acknowledged the Phobos-Ground mission was ill-prepared, but said that Roscosmos had to give it the go-ahead so as not to miss the limited Earth-to-Mars launch window.

Its predecessor, Mars-96, which was built by the same Moscow-based NPO Lavochkin company, also suffered an engine failure and crashed shortly after its launch in 1996. Its crash drew strong international fears because of some 200 grams of plutonium onboard. The craft eventually showered its fragments over the Chile-Bolivia border in the Andes Mountains, and the pieces were never recovered.

The worst ever radiation spill from a derelict space vehicle came in January 1978 when the nuclear-powered Cosmos 954 satellite crashed over northwestern Canada. The Soviets claimed the craft completely burned up on re-entry, but a massive recovery effort by Canadian authorities recovered a dozen fragments, most of which were radioactive.

The Phobos-Ground also contains a tiny quantity of the radioactive metal Cobalt-57 in one of its instruments, but Roscosmos said it poses no threat of radioactive contamination.

The spacecraft also carries a small cylinder with a collection of microbes as part of an experiment by the Pasadena, California-based Planetary Society that designed to explore whether they can survive interplanetary travel. The cylinder is attached to a capsule that was supposed to deliver Phobos ground samples back to Earth.

Igor Marinin, the editor of Russia's Novosti Kosmonavtiki magazine, said on Russia's NTV television that it will likely be destroyed in the fiery re-entry. ( Associated Press )

READ MORE - Russian space probe to crash to Earth within hours

Giant Tsunami-Shaped Clouds Roll Across Alabama Sky

 

 

Clouds along the horizon in Birmingham, Ala., on Friday (Dec. 16). Credit: ABC 33/40 in Birmingham

Giant Tsunami-Shaped Clouds Roll Across Alabama Sky - For a morning, the sky looked like a surfer's dream: A series of huge breaking waves lined the horizon in Birmingham, Ala., on Friday (Dec. 16), their crests surging forward in slow motion. Amazed Alabamans took photos of the clouds and sent them to their local weather station, wondering, "What are these tsunamis in the sky?"

Experts say the clouds were pristine examples of "Kelvin-Helmholtz waves." Whether seen in the sky or in the ocean, this type of turbulence always forms when a fast-moving layer of fluid slides on top of a slower, thicker layer, dragging its surface.

Water waves, for example, form when the layer of fluid above them (i.e., the air) is moving faster than the layer of fluid below (i.e., the water). When the difference between the wind and water speed increases to a certain point, the waves "break" — their crests lurch forward — and they take on the telltale Kelvin-Helmholtz shape.

According to Chris Walcek , a meteorologist at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at the State University of New York, Albany , fast-moving air high in the sky can drag the top of slow-moving, thick clouds underneath it in much the same way.

"In the pictures [of the Birmingham sky] there is probably a cold layer of air near the ground where the wind speed is probably low. That is why there is a cloud or fog in that layer," Walcek told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. "Over this cloudy, cold, slow-moving layer is probably a warmer and faster-moving layer of air."

Most of the time, the difference in wind speed and temperature between two layers of the atmosphere is small, and so the fast-moving air on top "simply slides smoothly over the slower-moving air like a hockey puck sliding along an ice surface," Walcek said. At the other extreme, if the wind-speed difference is too large, the interface between the two layers breaks down into random turbulence.

Kelvin-Helmholtz waves form when the difference in the temperature and wind speed of the two layers hits a sweet spot. "What [these pictures] show is air between these two atmospheric layers that is just very close to that threshold for turbulence, and mixing to mix the two layers together," he said.

This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.

The Mysterious Physics of 7 Everyday Things Can a Butterfly in Brazil Really Cause a Tornado in Texas? Do Ocean Waves Really Travel in Sets of 7? ( LiveScience.com )

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Planet found orbiting habitable zone of sun-like star

Planet found orbiting habitable zone of sun-like star - The most Earth-like planet ever discovered is circling a star 600 light years away, a key finding in an ongoing quest to learn if life exists beyond Earth, scientists said on Monday.

The planet, called Kepler-22b, joins a list of more than 500 planets found to orbit stars beyond our solar system. It is the smallest and the best positioned to have liquid water on its surface -- among the ingredients necessary for life on Earth.

"We are homing in on the true Earth-sized, habitable planets," said San Jose State University astronomer Natalie Batalha, deputy science team lead for NASA's Kepler Space Telescope that discovered the star.

The telescope, which was launched three years ago, is staring at about 150,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, looking for faint and periodic dimming as any circling planets pass by, relative to Kepler's line of sight.

 

An artist's illustration of Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star, in an image released by NASA on December 5, 2011. REUTERS/NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

Results will be extrapolated to determine the percentage of stars in the Milky Way galaxy that harbor potentially habitable, Earth-size planets.

This is the first detection of a potentially habitable world orbiting a Sun-like star, scientists reported in findings to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Kepler-22b is 600 light years away. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).

GROUND TELESCOPES

Planets about the same distance from their parent stars as Earth take roughly a year to complete an orbit. Scientists want to see at least three transits to be able to rule out other explanations for fluctuations in a star's light, such as small companion stars. Results also are verified by ground and other space telescopes.

Kepler-22b, which is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth, sits squarely in its star's so-called "habitable zone," the region where liquid water could exist on the surface. Follow-up studies are under way to determine if the planet is solid, like Earth, or more gaseous like Neptune.

"We don't know anything about the planets between Earth-size and Neptune-size because in our solar system we have no examples of such planets. We don't know what fraction are going to be rocky, what fraction are going to be water worlds, what fraction are ice worlds. We have no idea until we measure one and see," Batalha said at a news conference at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California.

If Kepler-22b has a surface and a cushion of atmosphere similar to Earth's, it would be about 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 C), about the same as a spring day in Earth's temperate zone.

Among the 2,326 candidate planets found by the Kepler team, 10 are roughly Earth-size and reside in their host stars' habitable zones.

Another team of privately funded astronomers is scanning the target stars for non-naturally occurring radio signals, part of a project known as SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

"As soon as we find a different, a separate, an independent example of life somewhere else, we're going to know that it's ubiquitous throughout the universe," said astronomer Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute in Mountain View.

The Kepler team is meeting for its first science conference this week. ( Reuters )

READ MORE - Planet found orbiting habitable zone of sun-like star

Fewer Asteroids Lurk Near Earth Than Thought, NASA Telescope Finds

Fewer Asteroids Lurk Near Earth Than Thought, NASA Telescope Finds - A NASA space telescope that mapped the entire sky has revealed that fewer potentially threatening asteroids are in orbits near Earth, space agency officials announced today (11. Sept. 29).

The discovery lowers the number of medium-size asteroids near Earth to 19,500 — nearly a 50 percent drop from the 35,000 space rocks initially estimated — and suggests that the threat to Earth by dangerous asteroids may be "somewhat less than previously thought," NASA officials said in a statement. There are still thousands more of these asteroids, which can be up to 3,300 feet wide, that remain to be found.

"Fewer does not mean none and there are still tens of thousands out there to find," study leader Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NASA's NEOWISE project at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

Scientists used NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), an infrared space telescope, to map the asteroid population near Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. By the end of the telescope's extended mission, called NEOWISE, last year, astronomers had found 90 percent of the largest asteroids near our planet, NASA scientists said.

The WISE space telescope mapped the entire sky twice between January 2010 and February 2011 during its mission, which was aimed at mapping near-Earth asteroids, brown dwarfs, galaxies and other deep space objects. For its near-Earth asteroid search, the space observatory scanned for space rocks that orbited within 120 million miles (195 million kilometers) of the sun. The Earth is about 93 million miles (150 million km) from the sun.

The telescope's NEOWISE mission discovered more than 100,000 previously unknown asteroids in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It spotted 585 asteroids in orbits that brought them near Earth.

The WISE asteroid survey, which NASA says is the most accurate ever performed, also lowered the estimated number of giant asteroids — space rocks the size of a mountain — from 1,000 to 981, with about 911 of those already known, researchers said.

"The risk of a really large asteroid impacting the Earth before we could find and warn of it has been substantially reduced," said Tim Spahr, the director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

NASA launched the $320 million WISE telescope in December 2009. It spent 14 months scanning the heavens in infrared light before NASA shut it down in February 2011. ( SPACE.com )

READ MORE - Fewer Asteroids Lurk Near Earth Than Thought, NASA Telescope Finds

Sun Eruption Creates Spectacular Plasma Tentacle

Sun Eruption Creates Spectacular Plasma Tentacle - A NASA spacecraft watching the sun has caught a dazzling view of a solar eruption that launched a vast tendril of magnetic plasma into space.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the sun tentacle, which scientists call a solar prominence, on March 19 as it erupted into space with a rounded, twisting motion.

The eruption occurred over five hours as SDO watched the sun in the ultraviolet range of the light spectrum, SDO mission scientists said in a statement. The solar observatory watched as the prominence twisted up from the sun and expanded, then became unstable.


Ultimately, the sun filament lost cohesion and its particles streamed away from the sun.

Image of sunspot take by Hinode Satellite - An image of a sunspot take by the Hinode Satellite is shown in ths undated NASA photo released to Reuters March 2, 2011

"Prominences are elongated clouds of plasma that hover above the sun's surface, tethered by magnetic forces," SDO mission scientists explained.

The sun is currently in the midst of an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle and has kicked up a series of powerful eruptions and flares in recent months. The SDO spacecraft and other space observatories are keeping a close watch on the sun to monitor is solar weather activity.
Earlier this month, the sun unleashed its second X-class solar flare of the year that was aimed at Earth. X-class solar flares are the strongest types of solar flares. The weakest types of solar flares are Class C sun storms, with Class M flares registering as medium strength, but still powerful, NASA scientists have said.

Strong solar flares, when aimed at Earth, can potentially disrupt satellites and power grids, as well as pose a hazard to astronauts on spacecraft. They can also spark dazzling shows of the northern lights, or aurora borealis. ( Space.com )

READ MORE - Sun Eruption Creates Spectacular Plasma Tentacle