On May 10, AR4436 fired an M5.7-class flare with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection that lit auroras at unusually low latitudes in the days that followed.
The point we keep returning to is the one mainstream solar physics still resists: a "declining" cycle does not mean a quiet planet. Historically, the strongest events of any cycle tend to cluster in the descending phase, sometimes years after the official peak, and the terrestrial consequences, from jet-stream distortion to electromagnetic stress on the atmosphere, intensify rather than fade as the Sun loses coherence.
