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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!"
I see... you feel spending $86 BILLION on patting down Iraqi's in the Green Zone makes sense. My bad...
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Oct. 28, 2003 | WASHINGTON (FX) -- President Bush blamed both the Sun and Moon for the recent rash of potentially devastating solar flare attacks in and around Earth.
"Basically what they're trying to do is cause people to run," he told a Rose Garden news conference Tuesday. "That's what terrorists, major weather phenomena, fires, and large things in space do." Bush said the United States was working closely with Papau New Guinea and Mongolia to prevent foreign fighters from going to the Sun in order to help it "cause more trouble".
"The Sun is dangerous because it believes that we are soft, that the will of the United States can be shaken by major stellar eruptions," he said in a 45-minute exchange with reporters. However, he said that experts in his administration had warned him that, rather like North Korea, that the Sun was equipped with nukular weapons therefore to attack it would be dangerous.
The Moon on the other hand, had clearly not provided an eclipse to shield the Earth from a solar flare. While some academic paper-pushing bureaurcrats (denounced by Bill O'Reilly as a "bunch of pansy telescope wankers") argued that this was a natural consequence of the Moon's orbit, Bush hinted that if the Moon "really wanted to" it could have protected the Earth from this attack.
"The Moon is much weaker than the Sun and we already have people in the military who know how to get there" Bush argued. "And we have intelligence documents showing that lunar-driven tides helped a ship containing Nigerian yellowcake reach a dock in Iraq in 1991."