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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.
I can't wait to see what effect this has on those electronic things in orbit..
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
You need to see both to get a fuller appreciation of the scale, but the 2nd video in the article is more impressive, IMHO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpkXhlPIINQ
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Translation: You can begin panicking now!
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Before you watch the video PLEASE find a way to do so without looking at it directly. A pinhole viewer (http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/pinhole3.html) will allow you to view your AVI files without suffering damage to your eyesight.
You think that's bad, wait until you read about Gamma-Ray Bursts. A big pulse of gamma radiation which - if one occurred near enough to us (say, in the same galaxy and pointing in our direction) would wipe out all life on Earth. Gamma rays travel at the speed of light. We wouldn't see it coming. There might be one hitting the edge of the atmosphere right now.
Too late to use those mod points...
If you want a more complete coverage of the event (not to mention a few more tasty videos) then there is a much better write up at The Sun Today .org which you should take a peek at.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
If any of them end up heading more directly in the direction of Earth it could interfere badly with electronics, especially in satellites.
Question to anyone who knows -
Is it impossible to defend against this in any way other than pre-emptively? I would assume that usually, by the time we're aware of a massive flare, its effects would have already passed us by? It's not as if our monitoring equipment transmits faster than light, unless the detrimental effects of the blast moves slower than light.
What I"m trying to say is, if I have a roll of foil, can I put it on my computer AFTER the flare or should I make a project of turning my computer room into a foil faraday cage now?
A billion tons of material blown away.
But "warming" is caused by "CO2".
Well... if the sun were not there, global warming would not be an issue. I'll grant you that.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I've worked in the NOC for 2 major telcos. Neither has any plan for solar flare events. When I brought it up I was literally laughed at. When I pulled down NASA's space weather data that rates solar flares effects on earth, correlated it with our network alarms and was able to show that given a certain size flare we were almost guaranteed to have a 10% increase in network alarms... a Huge spike only eclipsed by major Thunderstorms and hurricanes, I was laughed at even harder.
It's not profitable to plan for rare events. It's profitable to plan for common events and let the insurance cover the catastrophes. The public interest be damned.
We often see them coming thanks to satellites like the one that made these movies. It takes hours-days for the flare to get from the sun to Earth, so there is time to prepare. I think it's hard to be sure exactly how hard any given flare will hit the Earth, though.
I'm not sure if your foil-on-computer question is an analogy or not. On the personal scale I expect that your regular surge protector is sufficient. The disaster planning needs to be centered on the large-scale power grid, because it's the long power lines that build up the overvoltage, not your living room. We're not worried as much about your computer as we are half the power substations on earth exploding within an hour of each other.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
Go here and you can view animations of the sun using all the different telescopes on SDO...
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/aiahmi/rangeform.php
Instructions to view the subject solar flare: select browse by date range, enter 2011-06-07 00:00:00 as the beginning and 2011-06-07 12:00:00 as the end dates, select movie as the display, select resolution 1024x1024, and set nth = 1, submit and enjoy. Also, you can play with the different telescopes.
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
This is sad but true. I've been in the space weather business for 40 years, and was involved with the aftermath of the large geomagnetic storm that took out the power generator in Quebec mentioned in another post. There was quite a flurry of meetings with various energy agencies about what was to be done. Bottom line was that the space weather groups were asking that the power industry pay a lot of money for predictions and warnings that were not of the highest reliability (another sad-but-true fact). After the risk-management boys got done crunching the numbers, the power industry decided that it was cheaper to ignore the problem and live with the fact that they might lose a generator every 11 years or so. The insurance folks will pick up the monetary tab, and the Great Unwashed Public (also known as "the customers") will shiver in their dark unheated homes until things get fixed and like it. As long as these events can be legally treated as unpredictable "acts of God" there is no impetus for the power companies to do anything about them, free market be damned.
"Shit" is the past tense of "shit".
The simple past of 'to shit; is, in fact 'shat,' as in "the man shat his pants." 'To shit' is an example of a germanic strong verb which forms the past by use of an ablaut, such as: sing/sang; spit/spat; sit/sat; shit/shat ... etc. Were it weak verb it would form it's simple past with the addition of a suffix, ie. shitted.
"Shat" just sounds fucking stupid.
It sounds stupid to you. That is not only because of your poor grasp of the rules of grammar, but because those who use the word in everyday conversation are not necessarily any better educated than you are. Thus you will likely not have heard the word used grammatically.
To people who have had normative grammar rammed into their skulls, sentences such as, "The man sit on the bench." or "The man shit his pants." or "I remember when he sing a very sad song" or, to use a weak verb, "that guy fuck me over bad" sound, not merely "fucking stupid," but just plain wrong.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I used 'shat' in a scrabble tournament. It passed challenge. I assure you, it is a word.