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Massive Sun Flare This Weekend
A lot of people have been writing to us for the last couple of days, talking about the massive sunflare or cornoral mass ejection that's headed our way. The folks in Quebec probably remember the disastrous one from 11 years ago - solar flares can due massive damage. So, don't be surprised if the cell phone/satellite dish and such isn't work up to snuff - and if you live in the North, keep an eye out for some beautiful aurorae, as skajohna pointed out. BTW, the touchdown dates are expected to be the 19th (today) and 20th.
I could SWEAR it sounds really familiar. Not the space shutle of course, but some kind of interplanetary mission. It's in the middle of a 2 year journey or something and surprise, a big solar flare. So the whole crew has to hide out in a special little area surrounded by all the water tanks (for the fusion engine of course).
Anyone remember this?
The NSF is the National Science Foundation, the guys who ran the Internet backbone for a long time, with US Government money. They supplied many countries with international feeds. When the US segments of the Internet were privatised, all NSF equiptment transferred to private companies, who had neither the resources nor the will to maintain it. It's expensive to maintain lots of high-speed feeds - much cheaper to throw away and and all you don't need at that minute, and worry about emergency backups when the emergencies happen.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I see some of the space weather sites going down hard tonight. The biggest effect of this storm will be that a LOT of university sites will have to upgrade their systems.
:)
Click here for the Space Environment Center's daily forecast and current conditions. Nice plots, basically of the Sun and Earth conditions. No solar wind, though.
Also the SOHO spacecraft has a really awesome monitor, results from which are shown at this page .
Be the first on your block to detect the CME shock front!
kabloie
I have one question....all that money spent trying to fix the Y2K bug...shouldn't some of it had gone to solar flaring ( or CME ) protecting our information infastucture. The internet/technology was NOWHERE near as widespread as it was during the last solar maximum ( 11 years ago....back in 1989, when the WWW wasn't even a thought at CERN and Mosiac years away for NCSA ). How come nobody ever did anything before? Because like the Y2K bug we haven't thought about it until it's too late. I just hope it's not too bad....of course it might explain why none of Slashdot's images are working ;)
Almost all of these devices use UHF or microwave frequencies that shouldn't be affected by ionospheric disturbances. You might see some long distance propagation on VHF frequencies (lower TV channels and FM broadcast band).
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Primarily ionized hydrogen, a bit of helium (a few % or so if I recall, but I haven't worked in the field for years) and also trace amounts of other species, like oxygen, iron, calcium, etc. The blob of stuff emitted is a relatively dense plasma, as compared to the solar wind plasma.
It should be noted that unless you are an astronaut en route to the moon or mars, the danger to most satellites and terrestrial systems isn't the CME, per se, but rather the geomagnetic storms that sometimes are triggered by CMEs. Generally speaking, a CME will trigger a substorm when it impinges on the earth's magnetosphere over a long period (more than a couple hours or so) with a southward pointing interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). These solar wind conditions are said to be geoeffective, and they can trigger massive changes in the earth's magnetosphere, changes which can have deleterious consequences in systems we depend on, such as power grids and communications satellites. CMEs aren't required for geoeffective conditions to be satisfied (patches of fast solar wind with the right orientation of the magnetic field can trigger substorms as well), but they are responsible for the largest geomagnetic storms.
NSF = The National Science Foundation.
Noel
RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix
kayaking
Complete fragmentation? Even if all satellites were destroyed, the undersea cables would be able to provide *some* bandwidth, even if everyone could only get 1k/sec individually.
Hey, have any of you ever remembered that human civilization has only taken off since this nice interglacial period happened?
We *should* be in an ice age now, an ice age that should be slowly warming up over the next few hundred thousand years.
But, thank god for humanity, the glaciers retreated so that we could form our modern civilization.
For years, I've been telling my boss that our WinNT servers crash because of "Solar Flares"... then diverted the budget money for "neutrino shielding" to fuel my beer and pizza habit.
But now, one well-placed CME could wipe out our entire data center! Anyone want to sell me some lead?
I've noticed that images.slashdot.org has been down all day today. I wanted to ask the other /.ers if they've seen this too?
_________________________
Well, there is little TO do, unfortunately.
We rad-harden our satellites as best we can, but this radiation is powerful.
If a significant solar event happened when our guys were on the surface of the moon, they would have been dead in hours.
I however did surround my linux box with ~1200 lbs. of lead.
Sure, they're not making fun of me NOW are they?! :-)
Ignore Alien Orders
The "It's still mostly our fault" still doesn't pass Physics 101 --- the temperature rises before the anthropogenic gas buildup takes place. Until that is explained (and no anthropogenic model has done so), claims that solar forcing can't be it so it's "still" man (there's no "still there, really, since it was never proven through any rigorous analysis) should be treated with much skepticism --- solar forcing still accounts for MUCH more of the variance than any GCM.
You are right that radiation is dangerous, but only if you are outside the Van Allen belts, which extend from something like 6000 to 36000 kilometers altitude. Low Earth orbit is at about 300-500 kilometers, where most radiation has already been absorbed in the upper atmosphere. Still, astronauts on the space shuttle would get about a year's worth of normal exposure (down here on Earth) if a large solar flare happened. This is not too much, but they probably wear lead underwear 'cause they don't want funny-looking children afterwards. Some parts of the body are much more sensitive than others to radiation. In low earth orbit, 4mm thick of aluminum shielding is enough (shuttle is thicker) and you would get about 100 rad/year. Appollo had 7 g/cm^2 aluminum equivalent shielding, which would not have been enough for astronauts to survive a large flare.
current aurora activity:
Auroral Activity Extrapolated from NOAA POES
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/index.html
gopher://sec.noaa.gov/00/forecasts/ALTS.txt
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/info/kp-aurora.html
http://uvisun.msfc.nasa.gov/UVI/current_image.h
http://solar.uleth.ca/www/auroras.html
--Neal
--Neal
Go IETF!
There's a nice little html code available, so you can add the X-ray flare and geomagnetic storm monitor to your own website as well... check out some of the other interesting pages on the site, like the one with daily solar images of different types from spacecraft (SOHO) and ground observatories.
-
I've been an astronomer for some time,
and I can assure you, this won't harm satellites or anything else.
This is way more common than it seems,
just because such things weren't reported in the past (meaning 10+ years ago).
The sun's activity has a 8 / 12 year cycle.
Over that period activity, such as flares and increasing sun spots, become more frequent, then they fade back to normal.
In other words: 8 / 12 years ago the same thing happened, and it didn't caused any harm.
PS: "8 / 12" year cycle means that there are two cycles overlapping each other.
Astronomers normally mention just the 12 year period, and both periods are not accurate.
So - don't panic, nothing will happen.
george./
Remember that solar flares can erase magnetic media. Don't wrap them in tin foil though -- have you ever seen what happens to tin foil in the microwave? Then don't wrap them in tinfoil. Wrap them in an old pillow case and then wrap it with magnets! Solar flares HATE magnets!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The problem is electrostatic discharges. When ionized particles hit the satellite they leave an electric charge which builds up until the maximum voltage supported by the insulation is reached and a spark jumps between two conductors.
Ironically, older satellites, with lower communication capacity, were more resistant to this effect, because they were spin-stabilized. The rotation had an effect of equalizing the electric charges along the satellite structure. Newer and more powerful satellites are three-axis stabilized, presenting always the same face to the sun, which is much worse from the charge build-up standpoint.
Moderators, take note:
1)Read the moderation guidelines before moderating anything
As we get further into the year, things could easily get a lot worse. Now is NOT a good time to buy shares in telecom satellite companies. Also, expect trans-continental Internet service to stagger. Yes, there -are- undersea cables, but much of the NSF equiptment used satellite feeds. If those are interfered with (likely) or destroyed (entirely possible), the Internet is likely to suffer severe lag, or even fragment until alternative links can be brought in.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
One thing that isn't reported in the press is the excellent agreement between solar forcing and global warming. To zeroth order the Earth is warmed by the Sun, but variations in solar irradiance are likely the primary contributions to decadal variations in the mean terrestrial temperature (as opposed to centurial or millenial variations like the major Ice Ages). Certainly there is a lot of data about climate over the last 2-3 thousand stars that is correlated with changes in solar activity.
A paper by Friis-Christensen and Lasser (1991, Science, 254, 698) showed that the mean length of the sunspot cycle is inversely correlated to mean terrestrial temperature. This correlation can be seen in other proxies of solar activity back millenia. Doing a quick search produced this page which has a lot of the basic underlying information. What one has to remember is that ALL of the "climate models" that are used to suggest an anthropogenic cause to global warming make the basic assumption that the rise in termperature is primarily correlated with an exponential growth in industry.
This is a nice hypothesis, but doesn't fly in the face of the data. FRom the F-C figure, one should note that temperature rises mostly before 1940. However, exponential rises in CO and CO2 production would demand that it take place *after* 1940.
Over 90 percent of the variance is explained by the Sun. But one thing is clear: in order to have 20th century global warming be explained by man-made causes, you have to violate cause and effect. There might be something buried in the noise, but that'll take more analysis to ferret it out. Nonetheless, it points out that one must be careful reading things in the press or from press releases.
One of my pet research projects is learning more about the sunspot cycle, Activity Cycles on other stars and stars with suppressed activity (like the Sun's during the Maunder, Sporer and Dalton minimums. So, a lot of what I've been looking at with stars, overlaps with some of the work done in solar forcing and its effect on Earth's climate.
Tech support> Well sir, it's likely your system isn't working due to solar flares.
... and for once, my BOFH Excuse of the Day would be accurate....