X17 Solar Flare Sends 2B Tons of Plasma at Earth

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @08:43AM from the spf-5000 dept.

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!"

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next day or two? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-28 08:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

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?
Check your servers.... by grsiepka · 2003-10-28 08:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.