Posted by
Hemos
on from the wham-bam-thank-you-sun dept.
glyneth writes "No, it's not a child of Storm and Magneto, but this weekend Earth has a 40% chance of experiencing a geomagnetic storm, according to this article. It could likely affect satellites in orbit along with power on the ground, as happened in 1989 in North America."
Today's solar flare was predicted, and was expected to be larger than the one that hit us on Wendesday. --- Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
--
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
I think there's something we can all learn...
by
Dirtside
·
· Score: 4
...from this:
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.
-- "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Want to see the charts?
by
Quincunx42
·
· Score: 4
Go here to see charts and graphs of solar activity. You will also notice the little red box in the upper corner is displaying a "Storm!" happening right now. I noticed it doing the same earlier this week.
A solar flare may be.....
by
MAXOMENOS
·
· Score: 3
...the only thing that can produce significant OpenBSD downtimes.
You can view movies of the event taken by instruments on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite here. These are pretty neat to see as you can see the actual coronal mass ejection (CME) as it shoots out from the sun. This is the largest such event of this solar cycle. Another great space weather resource is the NOAA site here.
In case you were wondering...
by
evanbd
·
· Score: 3
The reason that power grids are affected is reasonably simple. There is a large influx of charged particles coming our way at high speeds. Charged particles in motion set up magnetic fields. A changing magnetic field produces currents in loops of wire. A power grid contains LOTS of wire. You can read all about it in any physics text, under Ampere's law, and the Biot-Savart Law, and Faraday's law of induction. This will occur in any loop of wire, but we care about the electrical grid because we care about what form of current comes out of it, and that could change. The earth's magnetic field means that the majority of the particles come in near the poles, causing more problems for those in the north or south. Of course, the northern hemispher is pointed closer to the sun right now (that's why its summer), so the north gets affected more than the south (south of the equator that is).
Part of the reason that Hydro Quebec suffered such major losses the previous time is that they run their main distribution network at a higher voltage; I think it's at 635kV instead of the 500kV that most other distribution networks use. Now, under normal circumstances, higher voltage => lower current for the same power => less I2R losses, and thus a more efficient system. Unfortunately, the cost of the more efficient system is that it's a lot more prone to corona effects, which causes problems when the air starts to get ionized, as happens in a thunderstorm or heavy solar storm.
Other problem with Hydro Quebec is just the sheer length of the lines, which of course they can't do much about given the sheer size of the province. Solar storms play hell with local magnetic fiels, and the longer a power line is, the more power gets induced in it when the magnetic field changes...
Of course, given how much of the system had to be replaced after the ice storm a couple of years back, hopefully they've better isolated some of the distribution lines by now.
...he could see the Cerenkov radiation flashses inside his eyes...
While I don't doubt that he saw something, and it may well have been correlated to enhanced levels of radiation experienced in the SAA, claims of GeV+ protons produced from geomagnetism are difficult to believe. (Electrons are accelerated to relativistic speeds in solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the most violent geomagnetic phenomena in the heliosphere, but the ions remain non-relativistic). IMO a more plausible explanation for what the cosmonaut saw would be that shielding from the cosmic ray flux was lower in that region due to a thinner atmosphere/ionosphere above him, so more ambient cosmic rays could pass through his body.
Fifty miles of atmosphere is a shield that's going to be awfully hard for a space station to equal, let alone beat.
I agree with you, but my point was that the danger from energetic particles of heliospheric origin would be much lower for the ISS than for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Shielding from ambient cosmic ray flux is a different matter altogether--irrespective of the level of solar activity, people living in Santa Fe (7000 ft.) receive a much higher dose of cosmic rays than people living in Los Angeles (sea level). In LEO, away from the magnetic poles, Earth's magnetic field offers quite good protection from energetic plasma streaming from the Sun. The plasma can still find its way into the magnetosphere eventually, but this is an indirect process, with most of the highly energetic plasma confined to magnetic flux tubes far above the orbiting space station.
Slashdot Mirror
If this happens, I may have to shut down my PC over the weekend and go out in the sun.. Have you seen that thing? Its Hot!
air and light and time and space
NASA has done loads of studies on radiation and astronauts.
There's a really good write-up of it here.
-- V was its Victim who cried out "But why?" --
According to CNN, we were hit by a massiv e solar flare on Wednesday at around 6:30am EDT.
Wednesday's flare caused a few blackouts.
Today's solar flare was predicted, and was expected to be larger than the one that hit us on Wendesday.
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Go here to see charts and graphs of solar activity. You will also notice the little red box in the upper corner is displaying a "Storm!" happening right now. I noticed it doing the same earlier this week.
...the only thing that can produce significant OpenBSD downtimes.
The Second Amendment Sisters
Finding God in a Dog
If you want more than charts and graphs, check out this realtime picture of Auroral Activity in the Northern Hemisphere.
It's usually cool to look at, but now it's fascinating!
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
"I will bring your satellites, your power grids, your cellular phones, and your governments too their knees unless you give me... $1 million dollars!"
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
There is more information on the Solar eruption over here on Spaceref.com.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I think it's already affecting the ))DF)(#$*)0fa0d*)#*$)*#$)0808myasdfjthgkbndjfvaerk t ad ertkh ah
You can view movies of the event taken by instruments on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite here. These are pretty neat to see as you can see the actual coronal mass ejection (CME) as it shoots out from the sun. This is the largest such event of this solar cycle. Another great space weather resource is the NOAA site here.
The reason that power grids are affected is reasonably simple. There is a large influx of charged particles coming our way at high speeds. Charged particles in motion set up magnetic fields. A changing magnetic field produces currents in loops of wire. A power grid contains LOTS of wire. You can read all about it in any physics text, under Ampere's law, and the Biot-Savart Law, and Faraday's law of induction. This will occur in any loop of wire, but we care about the electrical grid because we care about what form of current comes out of it, and that could change. The earth's magnetic field means that the majority of the particles come in near the poles, causing more problems for those in the north or south. Of course, the northern hemispher is pointed closer to the sun right now (that's why its summer), so the north gets affected more than the south (south of the equator that is).
Part of the reason that Hydro Quebec suffered such major losses the previous time is that they run their main distribution network at a higher voltage; I think it's at 635kV instead of the 500kV that most other distribution networks use. Now, under normal circumstances, higher voltage => lower current for the same power => less I2R losses, and thus a more efficient system. Unfortunately, the cost of the more efficient system is that it's a lot more prone to corona effects, which causes problems when the air starts to get ionized, as happens in a thunderstorm or heavy solar storm.
Other problem with Hydro Quebec is just the sheer length of the lines, which of course they can't do much about given the sheer size of the province. Solar storms play hell with local magnetic fiels, and the longer a power line is, the more power gets induced in it when the magnetic field changes...
Of course, given how much of the system had to be replaced after the ice storm a couple of years back, hopefully they've better isolated some of the distribution lines by now.
-- Bryan Feir
...he could see the Cerenkov radiation flashses inside his eyes...
While I don't doubt that he saw something, and it may well have been correlated to enhanced levels of radiation experienced in the SAA, claims of GeV+ protons produced from geomagnetism are difficult to believe. (Electrons are accelerated to relativistic speeds in solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the most violent geomagnetic phenomena in the heliosphere, but the ions remain non-relativistic). IMO a more plausible explanation for what the cosmonaut saw would be that shielding from the cosmic ray flux was lower in that region due to a thinner atmosphere/ionosphere above him, so more ambient cosmic rays could pass through his body.
Fifty miles of atmosphere is a shield that's going to be awfully hard for a space station to equal, let alone beat.
I agree with you, but my point was that the danger from energetic particles of heliospheric origin would be much lower for the ISS than for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Shielding from ambient cosmic ray flux is a different matter altogether--irrespective of the level of solar activity, people living in Santa Fe (7000 ft.) receive a much higher dose of cosmic rays than people living in Los Angeles (sea level). In LEO, away from the magnetic poles, Earth's magnetic field offers quite good protection from energetic plasma streaming from the Sun. The plasma can still find its way into the magnetosphere eventually, but this is an indirect process, with most of the highly energetic plasma confined to magnetic flux tubes far above the orbiting space station.