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Three More Solar Flares
Evil Adrian writes "Space.com reports that the sun shot off three more solar flares on Monday. This is quite a historic period for solar activity." The article breaks down the recent flares, and what the effects have been. Update: 11/05 01:57 GMT by T : cyberMalex writes "Space.com is reporting the 10th in a string of major solar flares which have been errupting from the sun over the past two weeks. "This one saturated the X-ray detectors on the NOAA's GOES satellites that monitor the Sun. The jury is therefore out on the definitive classification of the flare." "Other scientists have indicated the flare may indeed be an X20 or stronger. Only one X20 event has been seen in recent years, and it was not Earth-directed and had little effect.""
From the site: Aurora Cam, which "shows the current extent and position of auroral activity in the northern hemisphere, based on measurements taken during the most recent polar pass of the NOAA POES satellite."
Does this recent solar activity make any of you feel uneasy? I mean... is it time for Bruce Willis to suit up again and save the planet? Nine X-class solar flares... eeeek. That has to be bad.
I wish I had my Revelations better memorized.
it appears that i was right the first time. Shamash, the mesopotamian sun god is really angry. run to your ziggurats all ye heathen, and make your sacrifices it is too late and we are decimated under his awesome power!!!
(for a niminal fee, i will be willing to act as priest...)
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
The Sun cut loose with three severe flares in less than 24 hours through Monday morning
cut loose? Is thr journalist trying to make a gastrointestinal metaphor here?
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Historic period in solar flares? Sorry, I might not be all that caught up on my solar flare monitoring, but how long have we been doing that exactly? It can't be more than in the last 50 years and considering the age of the subject in question, that's not even a drop in the bucket - its an atom in the bucket. Who knows? Perhaps this is a little more regular than we originally thought. We just started getting into this. I know if I had as much gas as the Sun I'd be doing a whole lot of belching too.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
From the article:The Sun cut loose with three severe flares in less than 24 hours
:(
That's nothing special, I've cut loose with three severe flares in one hour before!
Although I didn't cause pretty lights in the sky, I just cleared the room
It's the size of these flares that's unusual. Never have astronomers seen 2 Jupiter sized sunspots tranversing the sun at the same time. The number of sunspots is about normal for this time in the 11 year solar cycle. Here's a nice summary page: http://www.n3kl.org/sun/noaa.html
Another good article about this here.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
One thing that I'm really enjoying about the solar flares, unlike most Earthly climate events, is that we can be absolutely certain we didn't cause it via pollution or global warming or what have you. When I see the hurricanes and tornadoes and big wildfires, there's always this nagging worry in the back of my mind that it might not be happening if we weren't spitting out all the pollution.
:-)
But we have no effect whatsoever on the Sun, so I can sit back and watch the show guilt-free.
I always find it fascinating, when the universe demonstrates just how small and insignificant we really are... that, and watching aurora is a great way of getting kids interested in astronomy.
I disagree that we're much better at keeping records. The records exist, sure, and often they're stored on the most reliable media we have. You could have said the same thing 1000 years ago as well, and yet despite the abundance of records and the reliability of storage, not enough survived to give a detailed picture of many events. I suspect the same will be true 1000 years from now.
Oddly enough, we have to sacrifice Ben and JLo.
The Mayan line in question is "Big head, snake, rock shaped thing, potato with teeth, something that looks like a broken Trane air conditioning unit, something with three legs and four ears, a bigger potato with teeth and breasts, Jabba The Hut, another big head, a pile of little tiny heads, a medium sized head with a smaller head next to it, an aborted fetus someone inflated with an air pump."
The rough translation is "annoying couple (in unity) with mighty hair and (ass) who commit crime of that (terrible) Gigli."
Yes, there's a heiroglyph for "Gigli".
Hey, they were WAY ahead of their time.
Related Link
--- Ban humanity.
Scott McNealy is such a fucking loose cannon. When will his handlers reign in his hockey-rage?
FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN, PLEASE STOP SCOTT!
Here you go:
:)
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/index.html
That shows the current aurora activity for both poles. Click on the one nearest to you and wait until there's some activity near you
Even if the activity looks quite far from you, check anyway. We had lots of aurora visable here even tho the map showed it about a hundred miles away.
Bush - "The more solar flares are shot at us, the more it shows the desperation of the Sun."
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
One day in the class the professor says "Now, at elevations above 9000 feet it is extremely important to wear sunblock, since the ultraviolet radiation from the sun is much stronger where the air is thinner."
This guy shoots his hand up with a crazed look on his face and screams: "My God, are you saying there's RADIATION coming from the SUN?!" It took about five minutes of soothing, but he finally calmed back down and seemed to accept the fact that light, indeed, is radiation.
So don't laugh too hard. Some people might well be stupid enough to take your joke literally.
I'm no solar scientist, but I don't think it is even remotely reasonable for anyone to say anything about the sun is "unprecedented." The percentage of the sun's life that human beings have been observing has to be less than 0.01%
Maybe everything we've seen up to now has been atypical and this represents a return to the norm.
Doesn't anyone else see the correlation between Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California, the Yankees losing the World Series to the Florida Marlins and the repeated solar flares? I'm counting at least 3 horsemen of the apocalypse here.
That the apocalypse was narrowly averted in the National league and American leage championship series.
If Boston or chicago had won, I might be donning my tinfoil hat, but as it is, no worries.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
I saw one in Rhode Island last thursday night around 7:00. It was very dim and at first I just thought it was light pollution I always notice from the town north of me. But after a while it became more distinct and had that characteristic aurora shimmering and shifting. It was still so dim that I was half convinced it was only my over active imagination until a friend called to tell me to go out an look at it.