A sunspot surprised scientists and space weather experts on Sunday, March 10, by unleashing a strong solar flare. Over the past few days, minor solar flares had emanated from the relatively small sunspot AR3599, but it shocked everyone by releasing a powerful flare of class M7.4 on Sunday at 12:13 PM UTC. This flare was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME), which is a significant release of plasma and magnetic field from the sun. The CME traveled through space at a speed of about 750 km per second (1.7 million miles per hour), according to spaceweather.com. It is expected that the CME will pass in front of our planet; however, there remains a possibility of small G1-class geomagnetic storms on March 13, which could affect satellite systems and the Global Positioning System (GPS), along with potential auroras at higher latitudes.
Just eight minutes after the solar flare erupted, there was a widespread radio outage across Africa and the South Atlantic. According to spaceweather.com, radio operators experienced signal loss for up to 30 minutes following the flare.
