Slashdot Mirror
Massive Explosion On the Sun
Endoflow2010 sends word of an enormous eruption that occurred on the Sun this morning. Phil Plait describes it thus:
"What you’re seeing here is a solar flare (an enormous explosion of pent-up magnetic energy) coupled with a prominence (a physical eruption of gas from the surface). This event blasted something like a billion tons of material away from the Sun. Note the size of it, too: while it started from a small region on the Sun’s surface, it quickly expanded into a plume easily as big as the Sun itself! I’d estimate its size at well over a million kilometers across."
The attached video is well worth watching.
No, as massive as this explosion is, it will have absolutely no significant effect on the sun itself, these explosions happen all the time. This one may be bigger than most, but it is still way too small to "damage" the sun itself, or have any long lasting effects.
Its like thinking that a 10 Megaton nuke explosion on earth would cause long lasting effects on the entire planet itself. The nuke may be an enormous explosion, but it pales in comparison to the size and mass of Earth.
Hmm, that massive "whoosh" I heard may not have been those gasses falling back to the Sun like I thought....
While I am sure you are correct that many kooks claim that. I have seen the unfortunate other side of that coin far too often. That is people claiming something can NOT work because they don't understand that a system isn't closed. They like to cry "The law of thermodynamics" and "perpetual motion" not understanding that if you stick a magnet inside of something, you have added energy. It seems that there are plenty of kooks both on the 'free energy" side as well as the pseudo-"law of thermodynamics" side that can't understand the difference between a closed system and an open one.