On Valentines Day 2011 the Sun had one of its most powerful explosions which was an X-class flare. The blast was the largest so far in the new solar cycle. It erupted from active region AR 1158 in the Sun's southern hemisphere and the flare is shown here in this extreme ultraviolet image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The intense burst of electromagnetic radiation momentarily overwhelmed pixels in the Solar Dynamic's detector causing the bright vertical blemish. This X-class flare also had a coronal mass ejection which is a massive cloud of charged particles traveling outward at nearly 900 kilometers per second.
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