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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.
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."
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
Scientists have been using beryllium content in icebergs to trace the general prominence of sunspots and their activity over the last 1150 years. This activity exceeds any on that record as well.
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.
Sorry, I might not be all that caught up on my solar flare monitoring, but how long have we been doing that exactly?
Richard Christopher Carrington published his Observation of the Spots of the Sun in 1863. He was observing a group of sun spots when, "...two patches of intensely bright and white light broke out."
His description:
"I saw I was an unprepared witness of a very different affair. I therefore noted down the time by the chronometer, and seeing the outburst to be very rapidly on the increase, and being somewhat flurried by the surprise, I hastily ran to call some one to witness the exhibition with me, and on returning within 60 seconds, was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled. Very shortly afterwards the last trace was gone. In this lapse of 5 minutes, the two patches of light traversed a space of about 35,000 miles."
So I guess we've been monitoring solar flares for some 140 years...
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.
We have samples from icebergs measuring beryllium-10, which give us a good picture of solar activity for the past couple thousand years or so.
Aside from that, it's a historic period in solar flares simply because we haven't seen it happen before. Just because we don't know how common this occurence is in the full grand scheme of things, doesn't mean that it isn't noteworthy when we see it for the first time!
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.
Whats even more interesting is that there are fairly solid theories that solar flare activity is directly related to the mean global temperature. In other words, the green house effect may very well be *mostly* caused by the Sun, rather than CO2 in the atmosphere.
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."
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.
For the record, most environmentalists are less worried about the planet and more worried about you.
No one has any doubts that if human kind makes the biggest mess we can of this ball of mud that life will go on. The industrial companies are right, human kind is small change in the cycles of global climate.
Of course, when you're small change it doesn't take a whole hell of a lot to exterminate you and most everything like you.
No one thinks we're gonna wreck the planet, but aside from Al Gore, most of us wouldn't want to see Florida under water.
Humankind probably won't make any major changes in the global scheme of things, but the minor changes we make could cause untold havoc, suffering, and chaos... at least on the human scale.
So yes... the Sun might be the major cause of global warming.... in much the same way that your heater is the major thing that heats your house.
Does this mean it's a good idea to set the drapes on fire?
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.