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It's excellent. SpaceWeather.com. The flare today, sunspots 4274, around 10 today, and the 14.4 UPC producing an X1.8 class solar flare. The explosion was dramatic. A pulse of extreme heat from the flare caused a shortwave radio blackout over South America. And a CME is emerging from the blast site. As we receive fresh data from SpaceBasedCoronavirus. The strongest solar flare of the space age. 22 years ago today, the sun unleashed the strongest X-ray of the space age. The underlying sunspot was not facing earth, otherwise we might have experienced a new Carrington event. The debris flew harmlessly off the sun's western limb. The report of 2003 was so intense that at first no one knew how to... Those satellites were saturated for a long time. This clipped the readings at X17.4, but clearly it was stronger. Live radios in North America went silent as the continent experienced a deep radio blackout, a hint at the flare's true severity. Eventually researchers figured out how our personal favorite comes from this paper. There's a link on the site there. Which describes how earth ionosphere was used as a giant solar flare detector. Their answer, X45, has been confirmed by other studies. This puts it in the same ballpark as the Carrington event. There were no X-ray detectors in the 19th century, so researchers have to use indirect methods to estimate the speed of Carrington's flare on September 1, 1859. Studies of aurora's ice cores and magnetic disturbances suggest values near X45, although some estimates go as high as X80.