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Sun Produces Strongest Flare Ever Recorded
idontneedanickname writes "The BBC is reporting about the newest flare unleashed by the sun. According to NASA's SOHO website, "Today word came from the SEC that their best estimate was X28. We have a new number 1 X-ray flare for the record books." As usual there are magnificent images to be admired."
This one's not headed straight for us...
That Sun Microsystems was coming out with a new line of servers when they read the headline?
First the SunFire line, now the SunFlare line, the STRONGEST EVER!
This sig is the express property of someone.
Voyager got out just in time!
...who's trying to hack the Sun?
(Pun so totally intended.)
blog |
My guess would be... TERRORISM.
evil adrian
it's not like there doesn't need to be some additional light shed on us.
I'm not one to come out and harp on SUV owners, but with this abnormal solar behavior I think it's clear to see how much impact humans are having on not only our world but even beyond.
Emissions are way up and pollution is at an all time high in many areas. Add to that that the polar ice shelves are rapidly breaking up and falling into the ocean, and you've got yourself a recipe for disaster.
My favorite line in that article: "A period of relative calm is now expected on the solar surface. But another round is possible."
Reads as: We have no fucking idea what's going on.
evil adrian
...that Steve Ballmer hasn't just been eating a heck of a lot of Mexican food this week?
I don't know what you people expect from a giant ball of super heated gas undergoing fusion...perhaps large explusions of luke-warm gas and flaccid solar energy?
Next we'll see cloned sunspots from AMD and Cyrix, followed by a massive rebranding campaign by Intel...
Wait. What were we talking about again?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Hydrogen Hydrogen, the nuclear fruit
The more you burn, gravity can let it toot
The more you toot, the better your feel
So burn Hydrogen in every nuclear meal!
In Space...nobody can smell your vapors
-1 Troll (I wish I could think of something to post)
-1 Overrated (I wish my ADD would let me read and absorb all of this...functional illiteracy doesn't help either)
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
TiVo recordings of shows received from satellite TV might be interrupted.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
No doubt the delay in this news was a public-spirited attempt to avoid the mass panic of people rushing to hide in their basements.
This is Slashdot, we ARE in the basements
The probability of this happening is a double secret statistical anomaly.
I am a power supply design engineer among other things. (no guessing!) Please don't use words like "Flare", Burn-In, or "Let's fire it up!" when you are talking to me. At 220 volts and 10 amps, those are very unwelcome words.
* evolving night vision
* digging an extensive system of tunnels underneath all Wendy's locations
* building a large metal Sphinx-like thing that wails periodically
* keeping an eye out for Weena
Who's in?
The Law of Falling Bodies
<sarcasm>
The sun is angry; we are doomed. These flares are just the beginning, they will increase in magnitude until they are so big, they penetrate the Earth's magnetic field, destroy the entire ozone layer and sanitize the surface of the Earth with UV rays - just like an autoclave. Not even bacteria will survive except underground and deep in the Ocean.
The signs are showing, this is the END OF THE WORLD! The sun has been showing more activity since 1940 than it has for the last 1000 years put together. Doom is imminent!
Scientists don't act worried, they think they understand the sun and how it works, but science it just guesses. Maybe the sun is made of iron instead of hydrogen where would all the theories that say we are safe be then, if such a basic 'fact' about the sun turned out to be wrong?
As the flares grow in size and number you will all see that my theory is correct! "What is my theory?" you ask. It is that since the END OF THE WORLD makes a good movie plot point, that it must be happening NOW! These are going to be interesting times... We should all start storing canned food and porno mags in bomb shelters now before it's too late and we get cooked by the MASSIVE RADIATION STORM!
And what if the sun should stop flaring, and I should get proven wrong. WE ARE STILL DOOMED! In the same way that load from a light socket makes the generators in a power plant harder to turn, so geomagnetic storms transfer the kinetic energy of megatons of speeding charged particles directly to the magmatic dynamo at our planet's core. Small purturbations can affect this chaotic fluid flow in unpredictable ways but the most worrying is that the shock from the kinetic energy of all those particles will cause avalanches at the core/mantle boundary this will cause massive vulcanism that will cover the earth with lava!
If that doesn't get us, terrorists wielding viruses will.
Get out your sandwich board and whisky! Walk the streets and warn! THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH!!!!
<sarcasm>
Eat at Joe's.
Like the famous weather forecast in the Western Mail one morning:
"Warm and dry, but cooler with some rain".
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Didn't he also something like:
"I got a fever and the only prescription for it is more cowbell!"
Sol? Would you come here for a moment, please?
Sol: I'm sorry. I was late. I was having lunch.
I need to talk about your flare.
Sol: Really? I have 15 spots on. I, uh, (shows him)
Well, ok, 15 is minimum, ok?
Sol: Ok.
Now, it's up to you whether or not you want to just do the bare minimum. Well, like Sirius, for example, has 37 pieces of flare. And a terrific smile.
Sol: Ok. Ok, you want me to flare more?
Look. Sol.
Sol: Yeah.
People can get a sunburn anywhere, ok? They come to Earth for the atmosphere and the attitude. That's what the flare's about. It's about fun.
Sol: Ok. So, more then?
Look, we want you to express yourself, ok? If you think the bare minimum is enough, then ok. But some suns choose to flare more and we encourage that, ok? You do want to express yourself, don't you?
Sol: Yeah. Yeah.
Great. Great. That's all I ask.
Sol: Ok.
I mean it's OBVIOUSLY a conspiracy between a few trillion tons* of hydrogen and some scientists to cheat the taxpayers out of money! The nerve of these stars sometimes....
* I have no idea how heavy the sun actually is (and I don't particularly care)
Thank goodness it wasn't from the Pentium IV region, or even the extremely Hot Athlon XP region, we'd be burnt to a crisp. Damn solar over-clockers, If they burn out this sun, where are we gunna get another one? The bidders have been grabbing them up on ebay like hotcakes.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Surely these flares are signs of world's impending doom.
All spheres spontaniously grow temporary arms. Didn't you know that?
This... this is what's wrong with education today! They don't teach young'uns anything anymore!
Maybe the Sun wasn't getting enough response from its X-10 popups?
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Tough noogies.
Useless informational post:
The sun's weight is one solar mass. Have a nice day.
InThane
Have they warned those on the anti-Earth that it's coming round to point straight at them???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Guess this will put the kibosh on all those tree-huggers advocating solar as safe and benign.
Let's face it, it's time to shut down the sun before it kills us and step up use of safe energy sources like coal and oil. The sun has had its chance, and it blew it.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you SUV fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in an SUV (Vortec 4800 V8 engine with 285 horsepower) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to create a level 17 solar flare. 20 minutes. At home, on my Volkswagen Bug running diesel, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this SUV, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various SUVs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a SUV that has run faster than its Rice-grinder counterpart, despite the SUVs' faster chip architecture. My six-disc in-dash CD changer and Bose speaker system runs faster than this 285 horsepower machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the SUV is a superior machine.
SUV addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a SUV over other faster, cheaper, more stable vehicles.