NASA spots largest ever solar flare

NASA's newly-launched Interface Region Imaging Spectrometer, or IRIS, has spotted its strongest solar flare to date.

Solar flares are bursts of x-rays and light that stream out into space, but scientists don't yet know the fine details of what sets them off.

IRIS peers into a layer of the sun's lower atmosphere just above the surface, called the chromosphere, with unprecedented resolution. However, IRIS can't look at the entire sun at the same time, so the team must always make decisions about what region might provide useful observations.

On Jan. 28, scientists spotted a magnetically active region on the sun and focused IRIS on it to see how the solar material behaved under intense magnetic forces.

At 2:40 p.m. EST, a moderate flare, labeled an M-class flare - which is the second strongest class flare after X-class - erupted from the area, sending light and x-rays into space.

IRIS studies the layer of the sun's atmosphere called the chromosphere that is key to regulating the flow of energy and material as they travel from the sun's surface out into space. Along the way, the energy heats up the upper atmosphere, the corona, and sometimes powers solar events such as this flare.