Last night, NASA saw the year’s biggest solar flare

If you noticed a little extra radio interference last night, it wasn’t your imagination. At 3:16 AM, NASA saw the biggest solar flare of the year, an M6.5-level coronal mass ejection that was powerful enough to cause a brief radio blackout. That’s not enough to disturb much outside the highest levels of the atmosphere, but it still looked pretty spectacular through the right telescope.