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A mysterious widespread cellphone outage has coincided with the eruption of two powerful "X-class" solar flares from a "dangerous" sunspot. Yet scientists warn that the two events are probably unconnected. The two intense flares burst from the sunspot AR3590 Wednesday (Feb. 21) at 6:07 p.m. ET (23:07 GMT) and Thursday (Feb. 22) at 1:32 a.m. ET (06:32 GMT), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). After Travel ing to Earth at the speed of light, the flares caused successive shortwave radio frequency blackouts that lasted one or two hours. The first was over the western U.S. and Pacific Ocean, and the second was over the Indian Ocean. Related: Watch the 1st X-class solar flare of 2024 erupt from the sun in explosive fashion Hours later at 11a.m. ET (16:00 GMT) , multiple cellular providers — including AT&T , Verizon and T-Mobile — reported disruption to their service across the U.S. for over 70,000 users, according to the d...

A gigantic plume of plasma recently exploded from the sun's south pole, where solar erupt ions almost never occur. The explosion, which a photographer captured in stunning detail, is another telltale sign that the sun is about to enter its most active phase — the solar maximum .  The rare phenomenon occurred on Feb. 17, when a solar flare exploded from a sunspot near the sun's south pole, releasing a gigantic column of ionized gas, or plasma, that towered around 124,300 miles (200,000 kilometers) above the solar surface — around 15 times taller than Earth, Spaceweather.com reported . The plasma eventually snapped away from the sun and hurtled into space as a gigantic cloud, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME).   Astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau captured a highly detailed composite image of the plume before it broke away from the solar surface. "The plasma column was so large, I had to rotate the camera to fit it into the frame," Poupeau t...

Telescopes are great for exploring space, but there's no way should you be pointing one of them at the sun unless you have a solar filter — and as luck would have it, Unistellar is offering a solar filter worth a whopping $249 for free if you buy one of the company's smart telescopes.  This is a great time to get your hands on a solar filter as we get closer to the 8 April total solar eclipse , which will briefly plunge parts of the United States into darkness. This deal ends on March 3, so you have a bit of time to think about it — and telescopes are a big purchase — but with the eclipse fast approaching, it may be worth getting your hands on the kit sooner rather than later. That way, there's time to learn how to use the telescope properly before the big day.   Buy a Unistellar tellescope and you'll get a free Smart Solar Filter, worth up to $249 . View Deal Unistellar has an excellent lineup of telescopes — we previously called the Unistellar ...

Experts say that compared to the sun’s equator, our Sun is tilted by about 6 degrees. Since the 1970s, astronomers have not been able to figure out why this is happening. Now, experts think they may have found a solution: Planet Nine. Elizabeth Bailey works at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena as an astrophysicist and planetary scientist. She says that planet nine tilted our sun by six degrees and that the missing planet may have also tilted the other planets over the course of the solar system ’s History . Planet Nine is a celestial body that hasn’t been found yet but is thought to be at the very edge of our solar system . Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown predicted its existence in January 2016. Experts say that all of the planets in our solar system move around the sun in a flat plane that is within a few degrees of each other. But experts say that plane rotates at a six-degree angle to the sun, which makes it look like the sun isn’t in the right pla...

Twenty additional moons have been identified around Saturn, raising the total to 82. This surpasses the previous record holder, Jupiter, which has 79 moons. One of the new moons has the most distant known orbit around Saturn, and their sizes are all around three miles (5 kilometers). Two of the moons orbit the planet in around two years, while the remaining 18 require more than three. Seventeen of the newly discovered moons circle Saturn in the opposite direction of the planet’s other natural satellites. The orbit s of the retrograde moons are comparable to those of Saturn’s other known moons. And based on their inclinations, astronomers assume that these moons previously belonged to a much bigger moon that split apart eons ago.   The moons were identified by a team led by Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science using the Subaru Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. By observing these tiny moons and their interactions with the major planets, astronomer...