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Sun Releases Largest Radiation Storm in 15 Years 67

Posted by michael from the tan-don't-burn dept.
what_the_frell writes "Newscientist is reporting that a large cluster of sunspots has just released huge amounts of radiation toward Earth. The crew of the ISS reportedly had to move into the bulkier Russian section of the station, while airlines rerouted planes away from the most affected regions. Look forward to varying degrees of radio & cell phone reception and some pretty cool aurora boreali until January 22, when the sunspot storm turns away from the earth, pointing its radiation elsewhere."
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Sun Releases Largest Radiation Storm in 15 Years More

Sun Releases Largest Radiation Storm in 15 Years

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  • shucks (Score:5, Funny)

    by ike6116 ( 602143 ) * on Friday January 21, 2005 @06:54PM (#11437526) Homepage Journal
    I blame global warming.

  • GPRS (Score:2, Funny)

    by Shadow_139 ( 707786 )
    God Damn..., GPRS is bad as it is.....

  • Great (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 )
    As I have already said countless times on such occasions, now astrologers, psychics and other quacks are going to force their supersticious, geocentric, pseudoscientific, religious, flat earth, stupid mambo jumbo upon us, because those solar storms must surely have an influence on people. At least there will be something interesting to read on Randi.org, I guess.
    • "when the sunspot storm turns away from the earth, pointing its radiation elsewhere."

      This part of the summary post seems to suggest that it's not just quacks who are geocentric... who ever heard of the sun or it's sunspot 'turning away from the earth'... I was thinking maybe that the earth would move away from the sunspot instead,, you know as it orbits the sun. The radiation will stay where it's at but we will move out of it's path.

      • Sun turns around itself as well. A sun-day takes 25 days, almost a month. We can only see one side of it.

  • the republicans (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    they have to be behind this ... they have to..

  • Am I the only one... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PaulBu ( 473180 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @07:13PM (#11437646) Homepage
    Who reads (on ./!) "Sun releases..." and thinks about new, hopefully open-sourced, version of Solaris, not radiation? ;-)

    Paul B.

  • Northern Hemisphere Bias (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Noodlenose ( 537591 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @07:20PM (#11437698) Homepage Journal
    As usual in Slashdot, the whole commentary is of course very northern hemisphere biased.

    We down here at the end of the world on New Zealand's South Island look forward to view the magnificent Aurora australiensis, even if it is horribly misnamed.

    • Yeah, I know. New Zealand should really have been named "A couple of small islands off the coast of Australia".

      Or did you mean that the aurorae in the SOuthern Hemisphere should have been named differently? You're right, of course -- aurora's have nothing to do with the dawn.
    • magnificent Aurora australiensis, even if it is horribly misnamed.

      I hate to be a Grammar Nazis (Hell i'm not even a native english speaker) but shouldn't that be aurora australis [leeds.ac.uk]?

      And if you don't like the name just say it's a Polar Aurora [wikipedia.org]
      :)

  • Ahem... (Score:5, Informative)

    by NonSequor ( 230139 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @07:37PM (#11437788) Journal
    The plural of aurora borealis would be aurorae boreales.
    • It's curious that that pluralization to aurorae boreales has stuck around so long. It's certainly used. For example, Walt Whitman wrote

      "
      Amid pictures that dart upon me even as I speak, and glow and mix and coruscate and fade like aurorae boreales.
      --Walt Whitman, "Notes (Such as They Are) Founded on Elias Hicks"
      "

      But why is this?

      For example, "major general"
      would be pluralized to "majors general"
      when it was newly introduced into the language. The pluralization would follow its, I believe, french roots.

      As t
      • Well, I was mainly responding to the fact that the article submitter wrote "aurora boreali." Aurora borealises comes across as somewhat awkward, but really not much more so than aurorae boreales.

        It sort of irks me when people don't know languages but try to guess their way through them. In general it's wisest to just use English plurals, since using foreign plurals in anything other than the simplest cases generally doesn't mix well with English.
      • 1) Aurora borealises is inconvenient because of a double "s" sound. Besides, the general rule for "cactuses" instead of "cacti" and so forth is different species of cactuses. This is the same aurora, just several of them.

        2) Majors general is because major is the noun. The French plural would be majors generaux. Also, we've come to assume that "major" is the adjective and "general" is the noun, when apparently the reverse is true.

        3) In most Romance languages, including Latin, you do indeed say the literal
      • The problem is, even if Aurora Borealis was treated as an English phrase, Aurora is still the subject, and that's what should be pluralized. Sure, we don't pluralize adjectives in English, so we might say Aurorae Borealis instead of Aurorae Boreales, but pluralizing just the adjective would be about the wrongest thing you could do.
      • I cannot resist to shamelessly rip off http://www.lagged.za.net/scripts/Monty_Python,_Li f e_Of_Brian_-_Script.html:

        C: What's this thing?
        "ROMANES EUNT DOMUS"?
        "People called Romanes they go the house"?
        B: It, it says "Romans go home".
        C: No it doesn't. What's Latin for "Roman"?
        B: (hesitates)
        C: Come on, come on!
        B: (uncertain) "ROMANUS".
        C: Goes like?
        B: "-ANUS".
        C: Vocative plural of "-ANUS" is?
        B: "-ANI".
        C: (takes paintbrush from Brian and paints over) "RO-MA-NI".
        "EUNT"? What is "EUNT"?
        B: "Go".
        C: Conj
    • The plural of aurora borealis would be aurorae boreales.

      Pronounce both as "aurora borealis".

      • What did the Romans ever done for us? Apart from the aqueduct, the sanitation, irrigation and the roads, medicine, education, health and the wine, public baths, the public order?
        • What did the Romans ever done for us? Apart from the aqueduct, the sanitation, irrigation and the roads, medicine, education, health and the wine, public baths, the public order?

          You can't think of XI things?

  • Nice Timing (Score:5, Funny)

    by vigilology ( 664683 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @07:49PM (#11437870)
    Posted by michael on 23:52 Friday 21 January 2005: "Look forward to varying degrees of radio & cell phone reception and some pretty cool aurora boreali until January 22". Wow, thanks. All of eight minutes to look forward to something and drive to a place with a nice clear sky.
    • It takes a while for those protons to slam into the atmosphere and satellites so you are safe for at least a day. They are fast but NAFAL.

  • Wireless internet? (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @08:12PM (#11438015) Homepage
    Do you thi@%S^$@I%ere will be any pr%^VW#$%ms with wirel$%^)*VDTY$%^#$B%^&$%ternet?

  • Upgrade (Score:3, Funny)

    by wan-fu ( 746576 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @08:15PM (#11438039)
    Will this release take a version jump from 1.4 to 5.0?
  • Sun Releases Largest Radiation Storm in 15 Years

    All well and good but when is OpenSolaris coming?
  • Damn it, the Sun.

    We can't get much work done here. At any time a solar flare produces a greater flux of high energy particles in space, we have to shut down spacecrafts til everything is nominal. A series of the recent flare events are shutting down at least one satellite since Jan 16th and now it looks like the blackout will last til 23rd. That's a major blow to the efficiency of the usage (one of NASA's favorite metrics).
    • Which satellite is that, I wonder? Looks like you're near Boston so I'm assuming CXO? Our satellite (FUSE) has never had detector background problems that could be strongly associated with solar flares. However, we're in safemode for other reasons right now, so I don't know what the most recent flare would have done to our detectors. :)

  • Sweet... (Score:3, Informative)

    by MonMotha ( 514624 ) on Saturday January 22, 2005 @12:08AM (#11439161)
    And there's the ARRL VHF sweepstakes [arrl.org] this weekend. Should certainly be fun. 6m was open tonight (was hearing Florida in Indiana), but things may change over the weekend.

    I'm not very familiar with VHF/UHF propagation modes. Anyone have any hints on what this may do to propagation on the VHF and up bands?
  • from when bender shines the Z ray at Fry's crotch in the episode Fry and the Slurm Factory ... "AWW, my sperm!"

    The Sun ... making good men go sterile since the begining of time.

  • I was imaging this big deathray pointing out of Sun's HQ towards Redmond.
  • do the cosmonavts need to show their passports when crossing to the Russian section?

  • I saw this sunspot last week (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GreatDrok ( 684119 ) on Saturday January 22, 2005 @01:24AM (#11439499) Journal
    I was driving down to Newcastle from Edinburgh last week (15th) wearing my usual dark glasses and there was low cloud which meant I could see the sun's disc without it blinding me. There, right in the centre, a little above the mid point, was a huge spot. I told my wife to look at it too as I thought it was interesting to see a sunspot so clearly without any visual aids other than dark glasses and some cloud. Man, that thing is big......
  • I think you have SUN confused with SCO... Oh wait, that was a legal storm... ignore me.

  • Satellites lost... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Exocet ( 3998 ) * on Saturday January 22, 2005 @04:11AM (#11440144) Homepage Journal
    Didn't Intelsat just recently lose a satellite? Like, just the other day? I saw some slashdot'ers speculating on various causes (metal whiskers were my favourite) but perhaps sunspot activity had something to do with it?

    Admittedly, they lost it on the 14th, so perhaps this is a tenuous grasp at best.

    Intelsat Loses Another Satellite [slashdot.org]
  • damn that falling water and cloudy sky. every damn chance i've had to see the Aurora has been foiled. eithe rbecause i didn't know about it in time or because it's so cloudy. damn this rain.

  • Gravity Probe B affected as well. (Score:3, Informative)

    by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater.gmail@com> on Saturday January 22, 2005 @08:11PM (#11444911) Homepage
    Gravity Probe B (previously discussed on Slashdot here [slashdot.org] and here [slashdot.org].) was also affected according to their latest bulletin [stanford.edu].

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