Prologue

1 FEBRUARY 2026 · 171 Å. This is the Sun, as an instrument sees it. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, extreme ultraviolet. The timestamps are the spacecraft's own.

SOLAR MAXIMUM. The bright regions are the star at its loudest. Four days inside the high point of an eleven-year cycle, when active regions are most common.

FIVE X-CLASS FLARES. In these four days it flared five times. The highest-energy class. In NASA's footage they arrive as flashes with vertical stripes — the camera saturating.

ADITYA-L1 · SoLEXS / HEL1OS. Another spacecraft watched the same star. I built a verifiable pipeline over its X-ray archive and held out 192,541 minutes chronologically, because random splits leak.

THE FINDING. The models did not beat a single threshold. Learned: 0.966. One count-rate threshold: 0.954. The intervals overlap. I published that instead of reframing it.