Our accounts may have been quiet, but the Sun sure hasn’t! 
So far, November has already seen six X-class solar flares and the strongest geomagnetic storm of 2025.
All but one of these flares — the X1.1 flare on Nov. 4, shown here at the lower left — erupted from the same active region on the Sun: AR14274. This composite image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, helps us visualize how AR14274 has moved across the Sun during that time. This composite image is created by overlaying SDO’s images from each flare onto each other.
Solar flares, which are intense flashes of light, do not themselves cause geomagnetic storms — but they are often associated with coronal mass ejections, giant eruptions of solar particles, that do. The three back-to-back flares in the middle of this image, erupting on Nov. 9, 10 and 11, were accompanied by coronal mass ejections that triggered the intense geomagnetic storm of Nov. 11-13, which led to aurora sightings as far south as Florida.
