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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Actually by grsiepka · 2003-10-28 08:50 · Score: 1, Redundant

At our shop, we have dozens of E4000, E4500 Sun servers running with 400mhz processors. From what I'm told, (its sounds stupid as hell but true) some of the 400 mhz processors were not shielded correctly, so on occasions such as this (CME's) we actually had machines panic on us...