Longest-Ever Look at Stormy Region on the Sun Offers New Clues to Space Weather
January 5, 2026
2 min reading
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Longest-ever observation of a stormy region on the Sun offers new clues about space weather
Scientists observed an active region on the Sun for a record 94 days, marking a “milestone in solar physics.”
An image taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft shows a powerful solar flare produced on May 11, 2024, during a burst of activity associated with strong auroras.
NASA Science Visualization Studio
May 2024 was a tumultuous month for Earth: our planet was rocked by some of the worst geomagnetic storms in over 20 years. Triggered by a series of solar flares, the storms disrupted satellites, power grids and GPS and threw the northern lights as far south as Florida.
An active region on the sun, NOAA 13664, has been identified as the source of the flares. And on Monday, scientists revealed that they had observed the region for 94 days, the longest observation ever of an active region in the sun.
“This is an important milestone in solar physics,” Ioannis Kontogiannis, a solar physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), who helped lead the effort, said in a statement. “This is the longest continuous series of images ever created for a single active region.”
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The active regions of the sun are not easy to observe. Because our home star rotates on an axis, a given region is only visible from Earth for a short time before disappearing out of view.
The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter mission has helped change this situation. Since its launch in 2020, researchers have been able to use it to continuously track active regions, providing insight into how solar flares fuel geomagnetic storms on Earth. But scientists still can’t predict exactly how big an eruption will be, which can affect planning to deal with potential consequences on Earth.
“Even signals on railway lines can be affected and change from red to green or vice versa,” Louise Harra, lead author of a study detailing the researchers’ findings and professor of physics at ETH Zurich, said in the same statement. “It’s really scary.”
In the case of NOAA 13664, the active region appears to have originated on the far side of the sun on April 16, 2024, wreaked havoc on Earth, and died sometime after being out of sight after July 18, 2024, according to observations. The researchers hope their data will offer new insights to help scientists better track solar weather and understand how it affects our planet.
“We live with this star,” Kontogiannis said in a recent statement, “so it is very important to observe it and try to understand how it works and how it affects our environment.”
Editor’s Note (01/05/26): This article was edited after publication to better clarify that the active region rotated out of view after July 18, 2024 and to correct the name of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory in the image caption.
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