The sun fired off two X2.5 solar flares in seven hours, both from sunspot region AR4419 on the sun’s western limb, and the blasts quickly disrupted radio traffic on the daylight side of Earth.
The first flare peaked at 9:07 p.m. EDT on April 23, 2026, or 0107 GMT on April 24. The second reached peak intensity at 4:14 a.m. EDT on April 24, or 0814 GMT. Together, they were the strongest solar flares seen in 78 days, according to Ryan French, and they sent strong radio blackouts across parts of the Pacific Ocean and Australia before another blackout hit East Asia hours later.
The bursts did not come out of nowhere. They followed a flurry of M-class solar flares on April 23, along with a rare sympathetic flare in which eruptions happened in two separate sunspot regions on opposite sides of the sun. Both X-flares also appear to have been accompanied by coronal mass ejections, the giant clouds of solar material that can drive space weather impacts farther from the sun.
Because AR4419 was sitting on the sun’s western edge, forecasters say those ejections are unlikely to be aimed directly at Earth. But they are still modeling the paths, and a glancing blow remains possible. If that happens, the result could be geomagnetic storm conditions and vivid aurora displays.
Solar flares are ranked from A through X, with X-flares at the top of the scale. When the radiation from one reaches Earth, it can ionize the ionosphere and interfere with shortwave radio communications, because the lower layers of the atmosphere absorb or distort the signals. That is why a pair of flares like these can be felt far from the sun itself, even when the accompanying mass ejections are not pointing straight at the planet.
For now, the practical question is not whether the sun has turned active — it clearly has — but whether AR4419’s ejections merely glance past Earth or set off the kind of storm that lights up skies well beyond the radio blackouts already seen.
