The sun unleashed an extremely powerful solar flare, the largest in more than five years early Tuesday but is unlikely to affect the Earth, scientists say.

"It was a big flare," said Joe Kunches, a space scientist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Space Weather Prediction Center. "We lucked out because the site of the eruption at the sun was not facing the Earth, so we will probably feel no ill effects."

Aside from a few reports of brief short-wave radio disruptions in Asia, Earth remains unscathed by the solar flare.

The solar flare began at 3.48 am EDT and was rated a class X6.9 on the three class scale used to measure the strength of solar flares. The weakest flares are rated class C, medium sized flares are class M while the strongest type of solar eruptions are rated class X.

This recent solar flare is the largest one yet in the sun's current cycle. Solar activity waxes and wanes over an 11-year sun weather cycle with the sun transitioning to a busier cycle in 2013. Scientists expect more solar activity over the next three to five years.

The largest recent solar flare was in December 2006 which measured X9 on the solar flare scale.

Solar flares pose the greatest danger to Earth when they are aimed directly at the planet. Fortunately today's solar flare and the resulting coronal mass ejection, the cloud of plasma released by the sun after a solar eruption, were not aimed at Earth this time.

"Because of its position the CME is going to shoot out into space and not be Earth-directed, and we don't expect any big geomagnetic storm with this," Kunches told Space.com. "We did luck out. If this would have happened a week ago, who knows?"