This is the best summary I could come up with:

One of these powerful solar flares, which hit the Earth on May 6, caused a radio blackout across the Indian Ocean, with more potentially heading our way in the coming days.

Sunspots are fleeting dark spots on the sun’s surface caused by intense magnetic activity, which inhibits convection currents in the sun by reducing the surface temperature compared to the surrounding areas.

Sunspots can sometimes have specific magnetic field alignments, with those with a “beta-gamma-delta” magnetic field being considered to have a greater potential for producing significant solar activity, such as powerful solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

“The strength of these flares is then categorized as B, C, M, X where X is the strongest one,” Daniel Brown, an associate professor in astronomy and science communication at Nottingham Trent University in the U.K., told Newsweek.

The recent X4.5 on May 6 caused radio blackouts across the Indian Ocean, as powerful solar flares often do.

This is because high-energy radiation from a solar flare increases the level of ionization in the Earth’s ionosphere, which means that radio waves, especially those in the high-frequency range used for long-distance communication, cannot effectively reflect off the ionosphere to reach distant receivers, leading to attenuation or complete blocking of radio signals.

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