Sun Produces Strongest Flare Ever Recorded

idontneedanickname writes "The BBC is reporting about the newest flare unleashed by the sun. According to NASA's SOHO website, "Today word came from the SEC that their best estimate was X28. We have a new number 1 X-ray flare for the record books." As usual there are magnificent images to be admired." This one's not headed straight for us...

Impressive,

[Trigun]

Impressive until we realize that we haven't been measuring solar flares for very long.

Were these parsnips CORRECTLY MARINATED in TACO SAUCE? -- WTF is that?

Could this be from a colission?

[MarcQuadra]

Could all this activity be caused by a colission of some object into the sun? I'm just wondering if the sun got pounded by some asteroids a few weeks ago and they screwed up the balance of the surface, causing geyser-like effects.

Is the sun moving into some more active part of the galaxy recently, are we in the tail of some massive previous event? Are other stars in the neighborhood showing signs of duress?

how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep seeing that this is the most activity
since we've been monitoring the sun. How long
have we been monitoring the sun?

Solar Flares

[AyeFly]

Its strange how all of a sudden there are many reports of strong flares... Just as the Space Weather forecasting program comes up for budget renewal. [space.com]

Waitaminute

[Ryvar]

If those sunspots were pointing at us just now, and this flare had a southward magnetic alignment - that would basically be IT, right?

I mean, Fight Club-style apocalypse, the temporary collapse of civilization for at least a month or so until order could be restored, that kind of thing, yes? Anything not in a Faraday cage blown to Hell and gone, etc.?

Does that about describe the situation we just missed? If so, can we please, please find some way to artificially induce exactly that situation?

--Ryv

No. Here's a little size comparison for ya...

[n1ywb]

The area of sunspots responsible for this latest spat of solar activity are FIFTEEN TIMES THE SIZE OF THE EARTH. Just to make this perfectly clear, THE SUN IS FUCKING HUGE! The whole fsking EARTH could smash into it and the sun wouldn't even blink. So no, it's highly unlikely that some heavenly body about 100 times the size of Jupiter smashed into the sun and we didn't see it coming or notice it happening. Solar weather just goes through weird phases, just like earth weather. That's all.

Weight vs. Mass

[Sunlighter]

No, no, no! The sun's mass is one solar mass, or 2*10^30 kg, according to this page [sunblock99.org.uk].

But its weight is a different matter entirely. Weight is a force, which means it should be measured in Newtons. Weight also requires the influence of a gravitational field. Since the Sun is in orbit around the center of the galaxy, and in free fall, it is weightless.

(Well, actually, the Earth ''does'' pull on the sun some, so we can calculate its "weight" in the Earth's gravitational field independently of its "weight" in other gravitational fields... this is from memory, so it may not be completely accurate...

Gambit Version 3.0

> (define big-g (* 6.67 (expt 10 -11)))
> big-g
6.67e-11
> (define grav (lambda (m1 m2 r) (/ (* big-g m1 m2) r r)))
> (grav 2e30 (/ 2e30 330000) (* 93000000 5280 12 2.54 .01 .001))
3.6091773054556857e28
>

All right, the sun weighs 3.6e28 Newtons. So there.