Colossal X-class solar flare erupts from 'rule-breaking' sunspot — and Earth is in the firing line

The active sun is kicking into overdrive and we could be in for yet more dazzling auroras.

In the early morning hours of 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, according to Spaceweather.com.

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It's not the first sunspot to break the rule, according to spaceweather.com, it happens approximately 3% of the time. However, a majority of "rule-breakers" show a "reversed polarity" of +- instead of -+, but AR3784 lies somewhere between the two.

Experts at Spaceweather.com suggested that the "magnetic underpinnings of this sunspot are corkscrewing in an unusual way. If opposite magnetic polarities get twisted together too tightly, there could be an X-class solar flare." Lo and behold the sunspot did just that.