A huge sunspot unleashed a blob of charged plasma Thursday that space weather watchers predict will blast past the Earth on Sunday. Satellite operators and power companies are keeping a close eye on the incoming cloud, which could distort the Earth’s magnetic field and disrupt radio communications, especially at higher latitudes.

Researchers are now turning to automated image-processing and artificial intelligence to better forecast the sun's behaviour and give us time to prepare for a solar onslaught.

If the world ends in 2012, the sun won't be to blame, NASA officials say. Contrary to what some doomsayers would have you believe, our star isn't capable of blasting out a solar flare powerful enough to burn our planet to a crisp, according to the space agency.

A new way to detect sunspots as deep as 65,000 kilometers inside the sun can offer up to two days’ advance warning of a solar flare.

The largest solar flare of the current sun weather cycle erupted in a blast of energy Tuesday that probably knocked out high-frequency radio communications systems in the Mideast, according to Joe Kunches, a space scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.

Solar flares like the huge one that erupted on the sun early today (Aug. 9) will only become more common as our sun nears its maximum level of activity in 2013, scientists say.

Scientists and officials from a range of organizations gathered in Washington, D.C. to discuss plans for dealing with massive solar flares that could disrupt modern communications infrastructure. "A similar storm today might knock us for a loop," Lika Guhathakurta, a solar physicist at NASA headquarters, said. "Modern society depends on high-tech systems such as smart power grids, GPS and satellite communications — all of which are vulnerable to solar storms."

Experts said a U.N. plan to upgrade "space weather" forecasts can help the world cope with solar storms that might rack up to $2 trillion in damages if the sun repeated a giant flare of 1859.

New legislation, passed June 9 by the U.S. House of Representatives and referred to the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources committee, hopes to strengthen the electrical grid’s robustness against attacks from solar flares or terrorists among other threats.

Researchers met in London with the aim of setting up a European solar radiation-storm warning service. With the Sun expected to belch forth increasing amounts of bad "space weather" in coming years, the scientists warn that billions of pounds' worth of damage could be done to satellites in orbit.