Solar Eruption To Reach Earth Soon 159
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)."
obvious (Score:4, Informative)
Re:NBD, it seems (Score:5, Informative)
NOAA tells me that the auroral oval [noaa.gov] extends as far south as my home state of Nebraska, which is rare. That's not national news, but it's certainly local news.
Re:NBD, it seems (Score:5, 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.