Four NASA spacecrafts and one ground-based observatory captured images of the eruption of an X-class solar flare on March 29, one that officials from the space agency said was the best-observed event of its kind in history.
A solar flare is an explosion stronger than millions of hydrogen bombs. An X-class flare is the most energetic type of flare, and has never before been observed by so many telescopes at once.
Scientists can use the data from the observation to better understand solar flares and triggers for their explosions, as well as predict radio blackouts on Earth caused by these events, Lake County News reported.
"This is the most comprehensive data set ever collected by NASA's Heliophysics Systems Observatory," said Jonathan Certain, project scientist for Hinode at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "Some of the spacecraft observed the whole sun all the time, but three of the observations had coordinated in advance to focus on a specific active region of the sun. We need at least a day to program in observation time and the target - so it was extremely fortunate that we caught this X-class flare."
The solar flare was captured by the National Solar Observatory's Dunn Solar Telescope at Sacramento Park in New Mexico, Japan's Hinode satellite, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), NASA's Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) and NASA's Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI), The Christian Science Monitor reported.
The flare was followed by a coronal mass ejection, which was studied by NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
While scientists usually employe thousands of sensors and thermometers to observe terrestrial weather, only a small amount of telescopes are used for solar observations. The observatories set each telescope to show a different aspect of the flare at different temperatures and heights off the sun's surface. Together, officials were able to get a three-dimensional picture of the event, The Lake County News reported.
Scientists are currently using data from the observation to understand how a flare starts and peaks.
