In the early morning hours today (Aug. 14), the sun unleashed the most powerful class of solar flare, in a potent X-class eruption. The solar flare peaked at 2:40 a.m. EDT (0640 GMT) and caused shortwave radio blackouts over the sunlit portion of Earth at the time of the eruption, Asia and the Indian Ocean.

What makes this X-class solar flare particularly interesting is that it erupted from 'rule-breaking' sunspot AR3784 which had already garnered the attention of solar scientists and aurora chasers due to its strange polarity.

The sunspot's polarity breaks a hundred-year-old rule, Hale's Law, whereby sunspots in the Northern Hemisphere should be polarized -+. Instead, sunspot AR3784 is polarized ±, a whole 90-degree twist.

An image of the sun produced using NASA's SDO HMI Magnetogram instrument displays positive fields colored green and blue with negative fields appearing yellow and red. (Image credit: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO/HMI Magnetogram, graphic produced and labeled in Canva by Daisy Dobrijevic)

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