The Sun has just released its most powerful solar flare of the cycle, a colossal X-class flare.

The X9.05 Solar flare reached its peak 8:10 a.m. EDT (1210 GMT), causing shortwave radio outages over Africa and Europe, the sunlit part of the Earth at the time of the outbreak.

The solar flare came from the Sunspot Group AR3842, which has made headlines before. On October 1, the same sunspot region fired one powerful X7.1 solar flare and unleashed a coronal mass ejection (CME) – a cloud of plasma and magnetic field – that is currently flying towards them Earth. It is expected that the new CME will do this hit Earth between October 3rd and 5thpotentially triggering widespread auroras.

An Earth-controlled CME did indeed track the monster eruption, space weather researcher and meteorologist Sara Housseal confirmed in a post on Aurora. “Right now I expect an impact on Earth in the late 5th and early 6th,” Housseal wrote.