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NASA will hold a press conference Thursday (Aug. 18) to discuss "new details about the structure of solar storms and the impact they have on Earth," space agency officials said in a statement.

The briefing this week will review new observations from several NASA spacecraft, including the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (Stereo), that currently keep a close eye on the sun, agency officials said in the statement released today (Aug. 16). [Stunning Photos of Solar Flares & Sun Storms]

Thursday's briefing will be held at NASA's headquarters in Washington and will include presentations from several space weather experts. They include:

The news briefing will begin at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) and will be broadcast live on the NASA TV cable channel, as well as webcast on the agency's NASA TV website.

The sun is currently in an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle (the current season is called Solar Cycle 24) and has erupted with several major flares in recent weeks. The solar cycle will peak in 2013, NASA scientists have said.

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Last week, the sun unleashed its largest solar flare in more than four years. That Aug. 9 solar eruption registered as a class X6.9 sun storm on the three-tier scale used to measure the star's most powerful weather events. It caused some radio signal blackouts, but did not pose a serious threat to satellites and astronauts in orbit, or infrastructure systems on Earth as some major solar events can do. [Sun's Wrath: Worst Solar Storms in History]