Our Sun unleashed a massive solar flare aimed directly at our planet on March 11, the first super powerful flare of the year.

The phenomenal eruption, which peaked at 12:22 pm EDT (1622 GMT), was captured on video by NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory.

Shortly after the huge eruption that measured X2 on the scale of flare energy, Spaceweather.com reported a radio blackout over large swathes of the globe, including much of the Americas.

Like Us on Facebook

"The X-flare scrambled the ionosphere thoroughly so that no decametric radio signals were supported in my part of the world. The ionosphere started to reform after about fifteen minutes when stations began to reappear. (The stuff visible during the blackout was my own observatory electricity. Nothing exterior.)," said amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft.

The eruption originated from Active Region 12297 (AR12297), a sunspot that fired-off flares of medium-strength over the course of the previous days. The solar flare released Wednesday is categorized as the strongest possible solar flare, a monstrous X-class.

Colorado's U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) commanded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the event caused high-frequency radio communications to falter and created an area-wide blackout that lasted about an hour.

In the course of the past few days and after causing a series of R1 (Minor) and R2 (Moderate) Radio Blackouts, the flare was deemed the largest produced thus far by the sunspot.

Clouds of superheated plasma, known as Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), normally accompany a solar flare. This plasma travels at incredible speeds of over a million miles per hour. It takes a fairly long time, about two days or three, to reach the Earth in contrast to radiation that takes just a few minutes.

Power grids and satellite navigation systems may be unsettled by CMEs, especially if the flare is directed at the Earth itself.

The mechanisms behind magnetic reconnection are poorly understood, but on March 12, NASA launched four Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) satellites that will orbit Earth in the magnetosphere detecting reconnection events in our planet's magnetic field.

The science gathered from looking at our geomagnetic field will no doubt aid space weather models and will help explain how the extreme magnetic activity in the Sun's corona triggers energetic flaring events.

TagsSun Releases Strong X-Class Solar Flare of 2015, Sun, Solar Flare, X-Class Solar Flare, Active Region 12297, NASA, Magnetospheric Multiscale satellites, Satellites, NOAA, radio blackout