Tell me this may sound stupid but with all the solar flares going on and especially the big one that just occured is it possible that the sun is going through its dying fase or something like that, I am new to astronomy and new to solar flares and I noticed alot of them latley, some pretty big ones.

No, the sun is not dying! (Not for about 4-5 billion years anyway. ) It's normal for it to go though cycles of activity.

I pulled up a web site for you to look at that can explain it (it has some good graphics, too!).

http://science.howstuffworks.com/sun4.htm

This should help answer some of your questions.

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"As I lay beneath the Southern Cross, the stars tell more than I could" . . . David Meece

Well you could say the sun is dying. Sadly it only has 4 or 5 billion years left to live.

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"Eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy"
------------Mark Twain

"Women are like Voltron. The more you can hook up, the better it gets."

Why do you assume the most direst of consequences from events which are, for the sun, fairly mundane? We know pretty well how the sun is powered and how much time it has left. We also have a pretty good idea how it will evolve over time. By all accounts we have hundreds of millions to billions of years before we need to worry.

Here is a link to a decent description of the sun and its structure. It does not specifically deal with flares, but it does describe solar processes fairly well.

http://www.astronomynotes.com/starsun/s1.htm

I hope this helps.

I have sadly been lurking on the godlikeproductions.com forum and I noticed a thread about a gigantic solar flare about to nuke the earth. What, exactly, is a solar flare and what do they do.. and, like, LEARN me about this stuff!

Check out my link above. It is a short page, so it won't take more than a couple minutes to read.

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"As I lay beneath the Southern Cross, the stars tell more than I could" . . . David Meece

This page does a pretty good job explaining the Sun and it's workings in some detail, without getting too scientific. Click on the links in the sidebar for the topics you're interested in.

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

A solar flare is a tremendous burst of hot plasma aimed right for the Earth that's going to cook us all 2 weeks from now and mean the end of civilization as we know it. Earlier solar flares were responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, the flood of Noah, and the sinking of Atlantis. They are caused by space aliens testing their nuclear arsenals on the surface of the sun. NASA doesn't want you to know about this so as not to start a panic in the world currency market.

There. Happy?

It is a little unusual for an X class flare to be occurring now that the solar cycle has peaked. The sun has been quiet for several months.