Overview
- Combined data from Solar Orbiter’s shifting vantage and SDO’s near-side coverage produced the first near-continuous 94-day record of a single active region.
- The team tracked NOAA 13664 from its far-side emergence on April 16, 2024 to its decay after July 18, documenting increasingly complex, tangled magnetic fields.
- The region generated multiple eruptions, including what researchers describe as the strongest solar flare in roughly 20 years on May 20 while still on the Sun’s far side.
- Once it faced Earth later in May, it drove the most powerful geomagnetic storms since 2003, extending auroras to unusually low latitudes and disrupting satellites, GPS, drones and digital agriculture.
- Scientists call the dataset a milestone for forecasting research and say it will inform future space-weather monitoring, including ESA’s Vigil mission planned for 2031.