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X7-class Solar Event Detected
SlySpy007 writes "Spaceweather.com is reporting on an enormous solar event which took place earlier this evening. This event, emanating from the gigantic sunspot 720, registered as an X7-class event, and increased the 24-hour probability of a minor geomagnetic storm to 60% in mid-latitudes (70% in high latitudes). The GOES-12 satellite happened to catch this event with its SXI instrument (Solar X-ray Imager), and there's a pretty gnarly animation of the event from 720 over at the SXI site. I know this is gonna cause havoc for plenty of missions in orbit now; wonder if we'll see any disturbance here on terra firma." Another reader points to ground-based monitoring stations detecting a surge in cosmic rays at the time of the flare.
Sorry, I was trying to etch my girlfriend's name (and yes, she is real) on the sun with my new laser pointer, and i must have upped the wattage too much. my bad.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
Oh no! Reed Richards, his wife Susan, brother-in-law Johnny, and test pilot Ben Grimm just took off in Dr. Richards' rocketship! They didn't know about the solar storm. I hope they'll be all right!
Was there meant to be an earth shattering kaboom?
Which is the greater risk - leaving our tinfoil hats on and having them focus the effects of this in our brains, or taking them off and subjecting ourselves to mind control from the black helicopter people?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Note the time this story was submitted -- the exact time that Dubya's second term starts. Obviously ${Diety} is pissed off about Bush's re-election.
I don't know about you but I have been tracking the weird-ass dreams that I remember for the last year or so and whenever I have a "rash" of memorable dreams I check the various sun tracking sites and almost without fail I will find that there was some kind of burst of solar activity going on around that time. It could just be coincidence but it's kind of spooky that I can track these two events more or less in lock-step.
Solar flares are $[Diety]'s fireworks. $[Diety] is obviously celebrating it all.
(It's all about the spin. Karl Rove would be proud of me... and that makes me feel so incredibly dirty right now. Must clean off stain of Bush/Rove appreciation... IT BURNS!!!!)
-Jellisky
The LASCO instument aboard SOHO saw a "halo event" but it looks a little off axis (to my untrained eye) so we may not get the full force of the CME.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Try this link instead. It is a javascript+JPEGs in high-res movie, works better than the link submitted in the story.
The good news is, according to space.com, people in the northern latitudes (including the northernmost US states) should have seen some northern lights.
:)
The bad news is that the aurora borealis caused by this flare was expected to happen Tuesday night or perhaps during the predawn hours Wednesday in North America.
The good news is that the sunspot that produced this flare could produce more major flares before it heads around to the back side of the sun in a few days. So you might still get to see the northern lights.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
This got me wondering what would happpen if the flare hit the Moon directly while astronauts/moon base residents were there. The following story explains that any moon base would have to be built several meters beneath the surface to protect residents from cosmic rays and solar flares.http://www.oregonl5.org/lbrt/l5aaa88b.html Looks like the Police should have been singing about "Walking In the Moon"....
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
...that X7 is a rather moderate eruption? For reference, we routinely see eruptions throughout the solar cycle at least that big, and many which are many times greater. Google around and you'll find an eruption which occurred in November of 2003 which was dubbed the 'biggest solar flare ever recorded'. That was an X28.
More details here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3251481.stm.
A few days ago it was slightly cloudy with a thin layer of clouds passing over the sun. Through the tinted windows of my vehicle and this slight thin layer, the sun was filtered just enough that i could look right at it. I could see Sunspot 720 without any magnification. It was so big, I swore Venus or Mercury was in Transit across the sun, but knew it couldn't be because that only happens every 100+ years and it already happened a couple years back.
I browsed the internet and found out that at that time there was a Sunspot, the size of 7 earths. It was 720.