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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...
I *still* havent seen any of the promised Aurora Borealis [space.com] from previous flares.
It's been a decade since last I saw any.
Someone posted a similar theory about asteroid collision on the BBC News website. If we are in fact doomed (assuming the Sun becomes a threat over next few weeks/months etc), it may explain why George Bush, Tony Blair and others are showing zero interest in the environment and the gradual collapse of their societies (in particular Britain which is in an infrastructure and moral mess). IE, nothing matters any more. For governments to achnowledge there is a pending catastophe would create so much chaos they may have chosen to act 'normal'. Even response to events in Iraq seems very 'low key'.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Craig DeForest, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute, said others in his field are discussing the possibility that Tuesday's flare was an X40.
"I'd take a stand and say it appears to be about X40 based on extrapolation of the X-ray flux into the saturated period," DeForest told SPACE.com.
That estimate may even be conservative, he said
x40.. holy crap.. and that number might be low
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
The solar flare produced proton wind in speed exceeding what the SOHO probe can measure. It also saturated the X-Ray detectors on NOAA's GOES satellites. X28 is an understatement, the actual value cannot be precisely determined, but is thought of being somewhere around X40 to X50. This is a logarithmic scale, NOAA says the peak X-Ray emission reached approximately 2 * 10e-3 W/ squared meter.
:
M-class solar flares' order of magnitude is 10e-5W/squared meter, X-class' is 10e-4W/ squared meter, and anything beyond 10e-3W/squared meter
- was unheard of until a few days ago.
- is a Y-class MEGA FLARE! Tin-foil hat time.
On unrelated news, X-Plane now supports borealis auroras...
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I hadn't heard that one before. And yes, it is disturbing.
eructation ( P ) (-rk-tshn, rk-)
n.
The act or an instance of belching.
Source: The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright (C) 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Highly unlikely. The heat from the Sun would vaporise anything long before impact.
Flares (including this one) tend to be linked with sunspots which are relatively cool (emphasis on the relatively there) areas of the Sun. The Sun is made of plasma - super-hot electrically-charged particles. The plasma convects, transferring energy to the surface of the Sun. As the plasma moves it creates enormous magnetic fields. Normally these are confined within the body of the Sun, but occasionally, the magnetic flux extends beyond the surface of the Sun as an enormous loop. At each point where the line emerges and re-enters the Sun are a group of sunspots.
Hot plasma streams along the line of flux, it usually confined to the magnetic flux, but occasionally it will break away as a so-called prominence.
Flares are relatively common, but their cause is not yet understood (if any solar activity experts are hanging around - please feel free to step in right about now :)). From memory, the most well-regarded theory is that ever-increasing amounts of energy is stored in the magnetic fields of the sun spot. As the field becomes twisted and tangled, the energy continues to build until a point when the magnetic field snaps back into a less-tangled state. At that point an enormous amount of energy and plasma are blasted into space in a very short period of time.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Yeah, that's great all the way up until science "discovers" some reason why barium levels in arctic/antarctic ice isn't a good way to measure this sort of thing.
It's not the protons, it is the waring down of the Earth's magnetic field, which is apparently happening. Am not sure of the consequences. Love your posting though! :-)
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Floods, Earthquakes, Heatwaves, Plagues, Mad Cows, Wildfires and Hurricanes in odd locations, anyone? Sure, this stuff happens, but all within such a short period of time?
Mind you, I doubt very much that the Earth is in any danger from the recent Solar activity. A few power problems, perhaps. (Not like those are anything new these days, either.)
It's the asteroid impacts, I expect, which could cause the, um, deepest impression.
No need to be afraid. It's happened before, it'll happen again. Kick back and enjoy the show. It's why you're here.
Oh, and the deadline for getting the heck out of the U.S. is rolling ever nearer. The government has been quietly re-staffing draft boards. But then nobody listens to the tin-foil hatter. It's easier to laugh than to actually do something.
Knowledge protects. Ignorance endangers.
-FL
The power of these flares spewing into space must be truly ginormous. Sure, they're unusual, and unpredictable. But if we could harness even a tiny fraction of even a single one, we could supply all the Earth's energy needs for the forseeable future.
How about we send a bunch of satellites into LSO (low solar orbit), within the orbit of Mercury, with solar photocollectors powering their wait. When a flare does come by one or more of them, a large, diaphanous electromagnetic antennae are charged by the approaching particle storm, converting the power into electricity, which charges a laser array. The lasers fire from the "lucky" satellite into a power grid among all the satellites. The satellites nearest the Earth fire the power at a receiver on the Moon, which charges a gigantic battery bored beneath the surface. Over months or years, lower powered lasers send the power to collector platforms floating on the seas, which send electricity over cables to the electric grid on land.
Sure, we'd have to wait years before a flare was captured. And it likely would destroy at least one of the satellites capturing it. But there would be several seconds during which the satellite could capture more joules of power than consumed since we invented fire. So after a patient wait, playing the odds, we'd win the solar lottery. If we started now, repurposing all that expensive, dead-end Star Wars spacewar technology, we might be ready by 2020. Then we could power not just our homey little Earth, but all our exploration/communication needs within the planetary systems.
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make install -not war
I don't know if he was talking about the flares or the fact that they aimed directly at earth for the first two because in context he says it is like a staring down the barrel of a great big gun pointed at the earth.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
Saturated the SXI imager as well. For those of you who don't know, SXI is a sun-pointed x-ray imaging device on a weather satellite.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The astronauts have about an 8 minute warning before the radiation for the flare gets to them. The actual plasma comes much later. NASA informs them, and they retreat to one of the Russian modules (Zveda I think) which has a small section that is densly shielded. Even there, I believe they receive about a 2 week dose of radiation (what we experience walking around on the planet on a daily basis for two weeks). Of course, that level is based on an X10 I think. I have no idea how much they receive from an X20, but obviously it's more. I don't think this will be a problem unless we get 4-5 more X20s in their stay. I am sure at some point, NASA would have to consider bringing them back early if the doses keep getting higher.
One thing to note, the Soyuze capsules are really bad at shielding cosmic radiation, so they aren't a very good refuge for that. So, if a big sucka (say an X30+) came off the Sun, the Astronauts would not be able to ditch till after the radiation pulse. They would have to endure it on the station, then leave for treatment back home. De-orbit with radiation sickness would probably suck.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
The satellites only have to work *once* to have a net power benefit. The power in a single flare is vast compared to the total power consumption of producing, launching and monitoring a network of even hundreds of satellites. If the Earth were as close to the Sun as I propose the satellite orbit, it would be fried by a flare; the energy released making the satellites here on the Earth hardly makes a ripple in the ecosystem.
The satellite lifetime is like the Star Wars "Brilliant Pebbles" tech: while the satellite is destroyed by the wave of energy passing through it, it lasts long enough to convert some power to a laser. The laser transfers power to a receiver a distance/direction away that is unaffected by the large power passing through the satellite, but even the fraction received is large. In Star Wars, the destroying energy comes from a nuclear blast, and the receiver is a military target on Earth. With the solar wind web, the destroying energy comes from a solar flare, and the receiver is a prepared target on the Moon.
Some of the captured energy is used to make and launch replacements for satellites destroyed by the flare. Or not - even a significant fraction of a flare's energy would put us in an energy budget environment that makes today's tech look like rubbing sticks together.
Solar wind power is better than Titanic petrochemicals for many reasons, mainly the superior efficiency of sending energy across the solar system in an "inertialess" laser, instead of bound up in matter. Then there's the reduced pollution of capturing and processing the laser energy, as opposed to burning chemicals to go out, retrieve, ship back, and process Titanic chemicals. And the pollution issue is relevant not just on the Earth side, but possibly on the Titanic side: maybe there's some kind of life brewing in that ocean. Probably not, but why ruin it for the possibility of human farming sometime in the future? The kind of life that might be affected by depriving it of a small fraction of the power of a sporadic solar flare is too different from us to consider, when compared to finding a cleaner way out of our approaching energy bottlenecks. Plus, we could siphon all these Star Wars scientists away from war development, into the more secure and profitable plentiful-energy business.
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make install -not war