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Solar Eruption To Reach Earth Soon

Posted by Soulskill on from the everybody-duck dept.

rastos1 writes "Spacecraft from NASA recently observed an eruption on the Sun sending billions of tons of particles toward Earth. The solar eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, occurred Tuesday at 1:24 a.m. EDT (0524 GMT) and sent charged particles streaking outward at 380 miles per second. That's just over 1.3 million mph (2.2 million km/h). The solar fallout from the sun storm is expected to reach Earth over the next few days. Interestingly, an unnamed icy comet from the outer solar system dove into the sun and disintegrated nearly a the same time (video)."

28 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. NBD, it seems by AndyAndyAndyAndy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "These particles cannot travel through the atmosphere to harm humans on Earth, but they can affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground," NASA officials explained in a statement. [Solar Max Photos: Sun Storms of 2013]

    Wednesday's solar storm erupted just 21 hours after another powerful coronal mass ejection (NASA calls them CMEs) on Tuesday (Aug. 20). That solar tempest also sent billions of tons of solar particles on their way to Earth.

    So maybe if you have satellite TV you'll see a few spotty moments, but nothing to worry about.

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    1. Re:NBD, it seems by epiphani · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, I can't understand why this is news. I've seen it on two sites now.

      This wasn't even an M-class flare, and the CME is only expected to push planetary Kp to 4. As in this doesn't even register as a geomagnetic storm. See this page for an explanation of Kp and you can also see this page for the predicted impact.

      Somehow some idiot picked up on this, and this news is making the rounds. I've seen a lot of people confused by the coverage - this is a bloody whisper in the solar flare world.

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    2. Re:NBD, it seems by stevegee58 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, but it provides a distraction for the public from the collapsing economy and rampant domestic NSA surveillance.

    3. Re:NBD, it seems by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Chill dude. Stop get off the news channels for a bit. Go out get a job, volunteer.
      Bitching on the internet, and trying to twist every new article into being relevant to your particular we are doomed senserio. Isn't going to help anyone, and it just makes you feel bad.

      If the worlds going to end. Might as well go out and enjoy yourself.

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    4. Re:NBD, it seems by jamessnell · · Score: 2

      Tell that to the telegraph operators with burned hands from a big CME back in the 1800s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

    5. Re:NBD, it seems by Ghjnut · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's good to see stuff like this hit the front page. It helps space out the onslaught of disappointing stories slashdot breaks regarding the incompetence/malice of leadership in this country. Seeing a cruising ice comet hit the sun with a CME following is pretty damn cool too.

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    6. Re:NBD, it seems by epiphani · · Score: 2

      Yeah, I can't understand why this is news. I've seen it on two sites now.

      If it's likely to cause aurora in locations that don't usually get aurora, it's definitely news.

      No. No it's not. On both your points. No.

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    7. Re:NBD, it seems by Hatta · · Score: 4, Informative

      NOAA tells me that the auroral oval extends as far south as my home state of Nebraska, which is rare. That's not national news, but it's certainly local news.

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    8. Re:NBD, it seems by Al+Al+Cool+J · · Score: 3, Funny

      The CME was the Sun's defense mechanism when it saw the comet coming right at it. It ejected in self-defense.

    9. Re:NBD, it seems by MickLinux · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, you're imagining the edge of the sun (!?!) as being the edge of visible gases. In terms of the sun as a single electromagnetic plasma unit, the sun is much larger than that; the comet was already in the sun.

      As the water evaporates off the comet, and then ionizes, it is going to disrupt the magnetic fields of the plasma streaming out of the sun. That, in turn, is going to cause a response. The response will attempt to restore the magnetic energy to neutral. Conservation of momentum, then, is likely to cause exactly the response you see.

      But don't take my word for it. Go back, and look at the graphs of the sun every single time we can record a cometfall. Now, find the number of CMEs of similar order of magnitude (nothing smaller than 1/10 the size) that occur each year. Then, taking the same "t seconds before impact" as your zero, calculate the probability of the CME being coincidence, vs. the probability of it being causally related.

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    10. Re:NBD, it seems by rastos1 · · Score: 2

      I've submitted the story. I'm so sorry I could not deliver a more newsworthy eruption. I'll do my best next time to at last bring the GPS satellites down.

    11. Re:NBD, it seems by dierdorf · · Score: 2

      "Every single time we can record a cometfall," my ass. The sun-watching observatories see one of these every two or three days and there is NO correlation to CMEs. Most of them are in the same orbit and are called Kreuz sungrazers, the remains of a big comet that broke up maybe 2,000 years ago when it passed too close to the sun. The bigger Kreuz chunks that miss the sun and come on around have been some of the most spectacular comets ever seen on Earth, simply because they generate huge tails on their close pass. This was an itty-bitty one -- the only reason it was visible at all was that it had already evaporated and we were seeing the dust and water vapor cloud where the comet used to be.

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  2. Check out the video though ! by ACK!! · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The whole icy comet diving into the sun and the bad ass far-side Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) is worth the 1:20 of your time. Very cool. Watching it happen is like watching something out of an old video game very interesting. Science can be quite a wild thing at times.

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    1. Re:Check out the video though ! by pr0t0 · · Score: 2

      The comet looks massive! It's hard to get a sense of it's scale given the sun's corona and the comet's corona, but that thing looks like a planetoid streaking in there. Is there any news on how big that was?

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  3. Re:Translation please! by egcagrac0 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Could you give that in manhattans^(1/2) per dog year, too?

    On a scale of one to tipsy, I'd say it's right between ocelot feathers and 7!.

  4. Simultaneity problem with that comet by Derec01 · · Score: 3, Funny

    The sun is vast, and that outward pulse appears to happen almost simultaneous with the impact of the comet.

    Which means I very much doubt it's related, as an effect would still have to have traveled at least some major fraction of the Sun's radius and back before the event would have been triggered.

    Granted, I suppose the comet could have been traveling away from us, and since the signal of the blast is traveling *toward* us, it basically pulled a Picard Maneuver and partially overtook the comet light.

    1. Re:Simultaneity problem with that comet by DeathToBill · · Score: 2

      But what if the sun-dwellers saw the comet coming?

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    2. Re:Simultaneity problem with that comet by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But it is the one written as "Oh, isn't it interesting that..." in the summary. I don't like *wink-nudge* suggestions like that in scientific summaries. Just say it's unrelated.

      Except, can we conclusively say it's unrelated??

      Certainly the two events were correlated -- if the CME happened at pretty much the same time as the comet impact, it's definitely interesting to note that.

      I mean, what are the odds that at mostly the same time you're seeing the one event, the other has just happened? In all likelihood the comet didn't have enough mass to have any affect on the sun, but it's definitely not obvious why the two events should happen so closely together.

      If I crash my car into a lamp post, and at that same time the building next to me explodes ... it's hard not to think "WTF happened here?". You wouldn't expect my impact with the lamp post to have enough energy or connection to the exploding building but you'd certainly notice it.

      So, either this is a really freak occurrence where two interesting but totally unrelated things happened at the same time (and I have no reason to believe it isn't) .. or something really fascinating was at work that nobody has a clue about.

      Of course, it's a completely un-testable thing since we can't just crash comets into the sun on demand ... but I would definitely agree with wording at as "Interestingly", if for nothing else than the sheer coincidence of the timing when you're talking about things on an astronomical scale.

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    3. Re:Simultaneity problem with that comet by mdielmann · · Score: 2

      I don't normally reply to myself, but I watched the video, and other linked videos. Here's one from October 2011. Looks like this one wasn't entirely inconsistent with past behaviour.

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  5. manhattans^(1/2) per dog year by barlevg · · Score: 2

    294,585,994

  6. One word by RivenAleem · · Score: 5, Funny

    *Burp*

  7. Re:Translation please! by SJHillman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Putting it in terms relative to the speed of light does help a lot. It won't make a huge difference to most casual readers, but anyone who knows that the Earth is roughly 8 lightminutes away from the sun (fairly common knowledge) can easily use the .11c to figure out exactly how fast it is in a meaningful way. Using mph/kph isn't meaningful to most readers because it's on such a different scale from anything else we'd normally measure in mph/kph.

  8. Check your math by barlevg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    2.2e6 kph = 0.002c...

  9. I guess .... by PPH · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... Ballmer got the message.

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  10. obvious by slashmydots · · Score: 3, Informative

    The timing is just too perfect. This is obviously an alien missile testing our resistance to EM radiation and charged particles and stuff.

  11. That was no comet by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Funny

    That was a Disaster Area stunt ship.

  12. One of my favorites by jratcliffe · · Score: 4, Funny

    Astrophysicist walks into a bar, orders a Mexican beer. Bartender yells, "OK, that's it, everybody out NOW!!!" As they're all leaving, another customer asks the astrophysicist, "what the heck is going on?" Astrophysicist replies "Coronal Mass Ejection."

  13. Solar observing from home by umafuckit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For those who are interested, it's possible to get the feeds from the orbital solar observatories and make your own movies of the Sun in action. A nice piece of software to automate this is jhelioviewer: http://jhelioviewer.org/ You can even purchase a small solar telescope that will allow you to view the sun safely at hydrogen alpha wavelengths (at which a lot of features are visible). A popular beginner scope is the Meade PST: http://www.meade.com/product_pages/coronado/scopes/pst.php (Lunt is another good manufacturer). With that you can see solar flares, prominences, sun spots, etc. Prominences are particularly fun because they change visibly over the time-course of minutes; so you can literally see the Sun watch the sun change before your eyes. Here's a link on what's possible to see visually: http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org/resources/solar-observing/observing-the-sun-in-h-alpha/

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