Cambridge, MA - Just when we thought we were through the worst of it, a second gigantic solar flare has erupted, sending another coronal mass ejection directly towards Earth. The X10-class flare was detected by an orbiting GOES satellite at 3:37 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Oct. 29th and peaked at 3:49 p.m., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "It's like the Earth is looking right down the barrel of a giant gun pointed at us by the Sun...and it's taken two big shots at us," says John Kohl, a solar astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and principal investigator for the Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectrometer on board NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. "The Sun is really churned up. The timing of two very large X-class flares aimed directly at the Earth, occurring one right after another, is unprecedented," says Kohl. " I have not seen anything like it in my entire career as a solar physicist. The probability of this happening is so low that it is a statistical anomaly."