Two powerful flares occurred on the Sun on December 20

Two flares of class M (penultimate power level) occurred on the Sun on Friday, December 20. This was reported in the Institute of Applied Geophysics (FGBU "IPG").

"At 10:26 Moscow time, an M2.1 flare was registered in the X-ray band in the 3924 (S20W89) spot group. <...> At 14:18 Moscow time, an M2.5 flare was registered in the X-ray band in the 3928 (S14E68) spot group," a representative of the institute told TASS.

He specified that the duration of the first flare was 15 minutes, and the second - seven minutes.

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Earlier, on December 15, an unusual phenomenon occurred on the Sun on December 15 - a large prominence of about 500 thousand km, which caused a magnetic storm of class G1. The head of the Solar Astronomy Laboratory of IKI RAS, Sergey Bogachev, told Izvestia on December 17 that this magnetic storm was not predicted as a strong one. It was low-power and was at the G1 level, which is the minimum of the five classes of storms, he added.

Before that, on December 8, the Sun experienced two flares of the highest class X and M. The duration of the latter phenomenon was 13 minutes.