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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.
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.
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!
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.
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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.
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.