Hi Kevin, I hope you'll still see the answer, being so late, not sure when solar week is officially over. This answer is a quote: "Solar flares were first observed on the Sun by Richard Christopher Carrington and independently by Richard Hodgson in 1859 as localized visible brightenings of small areas within a sunspot group." You can find more about flares here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flare Yan