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X17 Solar Flare Sends 2B Tons of Plasma at Earth
Dr. Zowie writes "This morning a very large solar flare erupted from a
large sunspot group that is crossing the face of the Sun. The explosion sent over 2 billion tons of material hurtling across the solar system toward Earth. Movies from the SOHO spacecraft show the flare
in UV and the associated
coronal mass ejection in visible light as they happened, and the impact of high energy protons that the flare launched at about half the speed of light. NOAA's Space Environment Center shows that the Sun's X-ray brightness went up 100x during the flare. Expect more aurora and geomagnetic effects in the next day or two!"
The sunspot cycle (which takes 11 years) peaked in 2000, yet there's an unusually large amount of activity of late. There was a somewhat intense solar flare a few days ago, and now this one, which is believed to be the third-largest one on record. Are there any explanations for this large amount of activity at what should be a non-peak time?
Why next day or two? At the half of speed of light, this stuff should hit us in about 16 minutes. So you can't really "prepare" for something like this. What am I missing?
That blast on the last few frames of the CME mpg file is the CME that occured earlier today. The end of the movie looks like someone polka-dotted the screen, but from the NOAA's website, that's actually the high-charged protons from the CME hitting the camera's lens. This is one whopper of a storm.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
We have probably 30-40 different Sun servers at our shop that actually are affected by this. I guess (it sounds stupid as hell but its true) certain models of Sun's 400 mhz processors (used in anything from Ultra 10's to E4500's) were not shielded properly and actually can panic when substantial CME's like this occur.