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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!
My guess would be... TERRORISM.
evil adrian
Space.com covered. it yesterday, with an update today. The bottom of the article has two cool animated gif's that showed the X-ray sensor blinded after the flare, and the subsequent coronal mass that was ejected.
Please direct all bug reports to
Impressive until we realize that we haven't been measuring solar flares for very long.
Were these parsnips CORRECTLY MARINATED in TACO SAUCE? -- WTF is that?
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.
The sunspots that produced these powerful flares during last days moved across the solar limb. They are now on the far side of the Sun. However, such huge suspots can last quite long and it is likely they will still be active after two weeks when the appear again on the side of the Sun facing Earth.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
...that Steve Ballmer hasn't just been eating a heck of a lot of Mexican food this week?
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)
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.
Its strange how all of a sudden there are many reports of strong flares... Just as the Space Weather forecasting program comes up for budget renewal.
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
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.
there's actually a webcam pointed at the sun... i'ts updated every 4 hours and can be found here.
According to Space.com: The image is generated by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, which sits partway between Earth and the Sun.
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 ?
If those sunspots were pointing at us just now, and this flare had a southward magnetic alignment - that would basically be IT, right?
I mean, Fight Club-style apocalypse, the temporary collapse of civilization for at least a month or so until order could be restored, that kind of thing, yes? Anything not in a Faraday cage blown to Hell and gone, etc.?
Does that about describe the situation we just missed? If so, can we please, please find some way to artificially induce exactly that situation?
--Ryv
The probability of this happening is a double secret statistical anomaly.
No, sunspots are systems far larger than and completely unaffected by any normal infalling material. Here's a good Q&A at space.com covering the flares in general.
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.
Don't know if anyone else saved the GOES XRay Flux image:
http://cyberial.com/images/cme.gif
Pretty impressive saturation!
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.
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.
... and as usual the Astronomy Picture of the Day, already has a good picture posted
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
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.
<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.
The area of sunspots responsible for this latest spat of solar activity are FIFTEEN TIMES THE SIZE OF THE EARTH. Just to make this perfectly clear, THE SUN IS FUCKING HUGE! The whole fsking EARTH could smash into it and the sun wouldn't even blink. So no, it's highly unlikely that some heavenly body about 100 times the size of Jupiter smashed into the sun and we didn't see it coming or notice it happening. Solar weather just goes through weird phases, just like earth weather. That's all.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
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.
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
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
My question is this: What do the numbers mean? Is it like the richter scale ( powers of 10 ) or what?
X-Ray flux is measured in Watts per square meter (averaged out over a period of time, usually over a minute).
10^-8 is the lower threshhold of an A-Class
10^-7 is the lower threshhold of a B-Class
10^-6 is the lower threshhold of a C-Class
10^-5 is the lower threshhold of a M-Class
10^-4 is the lower threshhold of a X-Class
10^-3 is the lower threshhold of a X10-Class
10^-2 would be the lower threshhold of an X100-Class
So, the X-28 flare saturated the detectors of the GOES satellites with 0.0028 W/m^2 energy.
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
No, no, no! The sun's mass is one solar mass, or 2*10^30 kg, according to this page.
But its weight is a different matter entirely. Weight is a force, which means it should be measured in Newtons. Weight also requires the influence of a gravitational field. Since the Sun is in orbit around the center of the galaxy, and in free fall, it is weightless.
(Well, actually, the Earth ''does'' pull on the sun some, so we can calculate its "weight" in the Earth's gravitational field independently of its "weight" in other gravitational fields... this is from memory, so it may not be completely accurate...
All right, the sun weighs 3.6e28 Newtons. So there.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
The earth is 6,378,100 meters radius 2 * pi * r^2 = surface area of magnetosphere facing the sun ( 6.3781 * 10^7 )^2 = 36 * 10^14 * pi * 2 = 4.52 * 10^16 watts = 45,200,000,000,000,000 = 45,200,000 gigawatts Much bigger than a hurricane, but spread out more.
Eat at Joe's.
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.
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.
--
make install -not war
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.