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The Sun Unleashes Coronal Mass Ejection At Earth
astroengine writes "Yesterday morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic field filled with cool plasma forming a dark ribbon across the face of the sun (a feature known as a 'filament') erupted at the exact same time. It seems very likely that both eruptions were connected after a powerful shock wave produced by the flare destabilized the filament, causing the eruption. A second solar observatory, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, then spotted a huge coronal mass ejection blast into space, straight in the direction of Earth. Solar physicists have calculated that this magnetic bubble filled with energetic particles should hit Earth on August 3, so look out for some intense aurorae — a solar storm is coming."
It's cosmic bukkake!
I hope this isn't some hyped up story about something the sun does regularly.
If you want a warning when auroras are likely to be occuring without paying Spaceweather for alerts (so you can scurry outside and look), check out the NOAA's SWPC mailing lists. Go for the K-Index lists, and sign up for all those that apply for your location.
To figure out which minimum k-index results in visible aurora from your location, check out this helpful page; just enter in your latitude and longitude, and it'll give you your "magnetic latitude"; match that up with a k-index using the table, and you know which mailing lists to sign up for.
If your phone does email, you can get the alerts anywhere; if your phone doesn't but your provider has an email-to-sms gateway, you could just forward emails for the same effect. :)
Are you trying to say:
"Here cums the sun?"
No, Alanis, that would just suck.
The enemies of Democracy are
sooo are you saying i should check out the sweet sunset that evening, or prepare for oblivion, or put on some sunscreen, or what? i beg your pardon, i'm just not sure what the proper reaction is when a huge coronal mass ejection blasts a magnetic bubble filled with energetic particles at me.
All organic life in the Northern Hemisphere is disintegrated at the subatomic level, Pacific Ocean boils away, Indian Ocean freezes solid, everybody in Uganda gets superpowers.
If this were a typical science fiction movie, they would have an astronaut deflect it using a mirror made from a candy wrapper and a tongue depressor. When that, surprisingly, fails, the radiation will strike the Earth, waking Godzilla, who will then proceed to destroy Japan. Since I don't live in Japan, I say let him have his fun.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
If a solar flare leaves the star Sol at 8:55am traveling at 540 miles/second and a plane takes off from Houston 9 days later, will the flight be affected by the solar flare?
No.
It's traveling very fast (one day to get here) in pretty much a straight line. It is so much larger and faster than the Earth that orbital motion can be neglected. Link
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It just means I get to take more pictures like these.
I wrote an application that keeps track of auroral potential WRT photography. It's public domain, and you can get the latest version of the project here. Linux, OSX. Nothing for windows, sorry. At least, not without substantial linux-like underpinnings. Love to hear about it if you did get it running under windows, of course.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Here are the classifications, and a C3 means few if any noticeable impact on Earth. It is the X class flares that we need to be concerned about:
http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/flareclasses.html