Sun Fires Off Major Solar Flare From Earth-Facing Sunspot (space.com) 53
A major solar flare erupted from the sun on Thursday in the strongest storm yet of our star's current weather cycle. Space.com reports: The sun fired off an X1-class solar flare, its most powerful kind of flare, that peaked at 11:35 a.m. EDT (1535 GMT), according to an alert from the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), which tracks space weather events. The flare caused a temporary, but strong, radio blackout across the sunlit side of Earth centered on South America, the group wrote in an statement. NASA officials called the solar eruption a "significant solar flare," adding that it was captured in real-time video by the space agency's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
A coronal mass ejection from the flare, a huge eruption of charged particles, could reach Earth by Saturday or Sunday (Oct. 30-31), just in time for Halloween, SpaceWeather.com reported. The eruption could supercharge Earth's northern lights and potentially interfere with satellite-based communications. [...] Thursday's flare appeared to also spawn a coronal mass ejection, SWPC officials said. [...] The sun is in the early days of its current solar activity cycle, each of which lasts 11 years. The current cycle, called solar cycle 25, began in December 2019.
A coronal mass ejection from the flare, a huge eruption of charged particles, could reach Earth by Saturday or Sunday (Oct. 30-31), just in time for Halloween, SpaceWeather.com reported. The eruption could supercharge Earth's northern lights and potentially interfere with satellite-based communications. [...] Thursday's flare appeared to also spawn a coronal mass ejection, SWPC officials said. [...] The sun is in the early days of its current solar activity cycle, each of which lasts 11 years. The current cycle, called solar cycle 25, began in December 2019.
Solar cycles (Score:3)
Anyone here want to expand on this phenomenon. I know we can make some predictions about solar activity but why do the cycles occur? Do we know why the phenomenon exists.
The counting seems odd. Whatever mechanism is causing it, why are we only on such a relatively small number for these cycles? Did we arbitrarily start the courting at a specific year or time frame?
Re:Solar cycles (Score:5, Informative)
Do we know why the phenomenon exists.
It is believed that differential rotation of the sun twists the magnetic fields and causes the sun's entire magnetic field to flip. We're at the start of another cycle (number 25 as it's known) and increasing activity (such as this event) is expected. It isn't know yet how strong the peak of this cycle will be.
It's a good time to have an amateur radio license.
Re: Solar cycles (Score:2)
Got it. So in between the flips in magnetic poles we have this activity though it's funny they mention it starting at the end of 2019 but we still consider this the "earlier days".
Maybe the mass elections take time to erupt from deeper within?
You explain the rotation as the reason for the flip but can you be more specific. Is it the rotation of hemispheres which twist in different directions? What's the force that causes the rotation to change? Seems akin to a friction force?
Why is it interesting to have an
Re: (Score:2)
it's funny they mention it starting at the end of 2019 but we still consider this the "earlier days".
We're a couple years into the start of cycle 25 so 2019 is, relatively speaking, the 'early days.'
You explain the rotation as the reason for the flip but can you be more specific.
This part [wikipedia.org] of the Wikipedia Solar Cycle page is far better than I might try to do.
Why is it interesting to have an amateur radio license?
A lot of reasons, but one of the more compelling is that the upper part of the HF band and the lower part of the VHF band "open" (become usable beyond line of sight) because various layers of the ionosphere reflect radio signals at those frequencies only during periods of high solar activity. This means you can communicate thousa
Re:Solar cycles (Score:5, Informative)
The counting seems odd. Whatever mechanism is causing it, why are we only on such a relatively small number for these cycles? Did we arbitrarily start the courting at a specific year or time frame?
Because the cycles are reconstructed from observation data as far back as 1755, dubbed "Cycle 1". 1755 + (11 * 24) = 2019, which was the end of Cycle 24, and the start of Cycle 25.
They undoubtedly occurred before 1755, there simply wasn't observational data for it. The sunspot cycle is a bit hard to see with the naked eye.
Re: Solar cycles (Score:2)
Ah, I skimmed over the 11 years part. Thanks for putting it together for me. Cheers.
Re: (Score:2)
Stare at it long enough and the image will be burned into you.
Re: (Score:2)
The sunspot cycle is a bit hard to see with the naked eye.
Try as one might to see them with the naked eye [s-nbcnews.com].
It's fine my Bitcoins are fine (Score:5, Funny)
It's fine. No need to panic. My bitcoins are fine buried under 100 feet of concrete. Anyone want to trade some food for Bitcoin? Please??? Guys?
Re: (Score:3)
My bitcoins are fine buried under 100 feet of concrete.
Finally, someone who knows how to safely store their Bitcoin in a cold wallet.
Carrington Event (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar flares are commonly classified in terms of their Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) 1–8 A peak SXR (soft X-ray) intensity. The scale is C1-9 (weakest), M1-9 (middle), X1-on up (strongest). The Carrington Event is estimated [swsc-journal.org] at >X10 (possibly ~X15-X42). The flare on 4 November 2003, generally considered to be the most intense SXR event during the space age, with an estimated peak SXR classification ranging from ~X25-45 but did not hit us directly. The event mentioned in the article is classified as an X1 event.
Do with this data as you will.
Re: (Score:3)
We only really know how often these have occurred since the space age (and not even all of it)
It's hard to say how many CME's close to Carrington Event intensity we have dodged.
Re:Carrington Event (Score:4, Informative)
There was another that hit us in 993 C.E. It is well documented in tree rings and recently used to date a viking settlement in Newfoundland. Lots of C14 created by the flares
https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Carrington Event (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09HJQJ59R/ [amazon.com]
In short, how effective could you be if you were suddenly thrown back to 1763 Colonial America? And how would someone from 1763 be able to cope with society in 2026? There's also an X50 solar flare thrown in that wipes out electrical distribution in the western hemisphere, which freaks people out today, but Benjamin Franklin is unfazed.
When HUGE solar flares happen, they create more carbon-14 in the upper atmosphere, which can be detected in tree rings of really old trees. There was apparently a huge one in 774 / 775. The Carrington Event of 1859 barely made a blip in the tree ring record. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2783/ [nature.com] So you could say that the really big whoppers seem to hit earth about every 1,000 years or so, but the data is really, really sparse.
Re: (Score:2)
So you could say that the really big whoppers seem to hit earth about every 1,000 years or so, but the data is really, really sparse.
Is there enough data to estimate whether these events are becoming more or less frequent? And/or do we know enough to estimate which should be the case given the characteristics of the sun?
Re: (Score:2)
In short, how effective could you be if you were suddenly thrown back to 1763 Colonial America? And how would someone from 1763 be able to cope with society in 2026? There's also an X50 solar flare thrown in that wipes out electrical distribution in the western hemisphere, which freaks people out today, but Benjamin Franklin is unfazed.
Actually, it's not longer an big problem. I looked into the whole "EMPs could destroy our grid!" claim and found the issue is massive (100+ tons) transformers could be destroyed. A report all about how parts of the US could be left without power for possibly two years was declassified a couple years ago which to me signaled it was no longer a threat. I did some digging and sure enough, some scientists created a laptop sized device in 2015 or so that negated all of the danger of possibly inflicting damage
Re: (Score:2)
This means that all damage would rare and localized.
Localized in the sense that it only hits the day side.
The most that would happen would be a blackout for a minute or two in some areas.
Nope. It can easy destroy the entire grid. Especially generators. No idea if modern grids are hardened against it. But the effect basically works like this: the solar storm is compressing the earth magnetic field. Consider it compressed like a spring. When the storm weakens, the spring uncoils extremely fast. That means th
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. It can easy destroy the entire grid. Especially generators.
This is contrary to all the research done on the topic as well as observations related to Starfish Prime.
No idea if modern grids are hardened against it.
The modern electrical grid is entirely different down to the street level transformers. Electrical anomalies of any kind are monitored and should they go out of acceptable range elements of the grid will shutdown on their own to isolate damage.
There are plenty of Chicken Littles like yourself out there screaming that we're a single nuke away from total devastation but the science has shown these are unf
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps you should read the science.
Actually I explained how it works ...
Instead of writing a page of nonsense.
Re:Carrington Event (Score:5, Informative)
Just to follow up on the previous post, it's also a logarithmic scale, so each letter is 10 times more energetic than the previous (so M1 is 10x bigger than C1, and X-10 is 10x bigger than M-10).
Within a letter, the scale is linear so an X-3 is 3x bigger than an X-1. That makes the Carrington event an estimated 15-42x bigger than yesterday's flare.
-JS
Bad time of year for Pacific NW sky watchers (Score:2)
But there's a chance we may luck out and have some cloud gaps at the same time this potential aurora will be visible. We don't get to see many, and even then they're generally low on the northern horizon - but this one could potentially be somewhat overhead!
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, I'm in the city, and the light pollution makes it hard to see even moderately bright stars.
Re:Bad time of year for Pacific NW sky watchers (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never actually seen one from here, other than via the Skunk Bay webcam. ;-)
My wife and I drove the Alcan a couple decades ago - saw several aurorae in Northern BC and the Yukon. The first time freaked me out a bit - I woke up in the middle of the night and saw these bright glowing, moving lights shining through the top of the tent!
Re: (Score:2)
I've seen some from the outskirts of Vancouver, pretty boring green or red sheet of light barely noticable
Back in about '93 driving through the interior, just north of the border, I saw a really good one, like you see way up north with lots of changing colours and patterns, pulled over and watched for like an hour, quite the sight.
Re: (Score:2)
I saw a really good auroral display while driving north on highway 41 in Wisconsin during late November. Viewing conditions were excellent - cold and clear. Watched them for about an hour before I got where I was going. Haven't seen as good a display since then.
Re: Bad time of year for Pacific NW sky watchers (Score:2)
U.K. here, you have gaps in your clouds? You lucky bastardsâ¦
Re: (Score:2)
Here, outside of Vancouver, every August for a week or 2.
My Zip 100 Disks are safe at least (Score:1)
In the late 1990's, I remember us getting hit by something similar. And I remember all the click of deaths I got. Sucks the tracks were written magnetically. When the flare hit, the EMP hitting the earth caused damage a lot of Zip disks. And of course, floppies got hit as well (usually not hard drives as much though.)
My Zip Disks I use for my Vintage Pentium 200 MMX computer I'm building survived this round, then again I'm in the middle of the USA, so it must've not reached the peak as far north as here,
Re: (Score:2)
> When the flare hit, the EMP hitting the earth caused damage a lot of Zip disks.
I'm old enough to remember the click of death (and all the funny sounds competing products like Syquest drives made when dying).
This is the first time I hear about it being related to sun flares - do you have any source for this idea?
I find it really hard to imagine that a sun flare can overcome the coercivity of the ferromagnetic particles in a ZIP-disk on earth.
Re:My Zip 100 Disks are safe at least (Score:5, Interesting)
Bollocks. The field strengths aren't even close to earth's own field. The only damage is to equipment connected to extremely large structures, like long distance transmission lines, because the induced mV/m add up. The high energy charged particles which pose a danger to satellites interact with the upper atmosphere (hence the pretty lights in the sky), so they don't get to your precious Zip disks. The magnetic floppy disks of the time were shoddy technology and needed no external cause for failure. People ascribed it to anything that could be made to sound like it could have maybe had something to do with it, in order to avoid having to admit to themselves that they paid good money for crappy technology.
Re: (Score:2)
Bollocks. The field strengths aren't even close to earth's own field.
Actually, it is the Earth's magnetic field that's doing the damage. What the coronal mass ejection does is to eject a cloud of charged particles. These are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field, which in turn is compressed. The compression of the field results in a time variance of the magnetic field at the Earth's surface, which results in an electric field.
Disturbances are on the order of hundreds of nanoTeslas, though-- thousands for the huge events, like the Carrington event.
Good article on the Car
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, of course it's the time variance of the field which causes induction, and whether you think of it as Earth's field being compressed or as a separate induced field counteracting Earth's own doesn't matter. Induction isn't the main point though, because the claim was about damage to magnetic storage, and that requires far stronger magnetic fields.
a 2000 V pulse
It is not so much a pulse or a wave as it is a "tsunami", a long rise followed by a long fall, and that's what causes the problems, because the induced current
Re: (Score:2)
I always assumed it was cost-cutting. I bought one when they first came out and it worked so well that my Dad bought one some time afterwards. His drive, and all the subsequent drives we tried, kept getting the Click of Death, while my earlier unit just carried on working happily. Maybe I was just lucky, but my gut feeling was that they'd changed the design after the first run, and broken it somehow.
Re: We've all been cyber-crippled. (Score:1)
Space weather (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure many people here are aware of it, but spaceweather.com is a great place to get info on sunspots, flares, CME's and other space-related events. They also have fantastic pictures by amateur astronomers and astrophotographers from around the world. Data about flares and aurora, courtesy of NOAA, is on the left side.
https://spaceweather.com/ [spaceweather.com]
Radio blackout? (Score:4, Informative)
Looking at the event summary only signals below 35Mhz were affected and even then only by 1db. Hardly a blackout.
Re: (Score:2)
So what do we expect this weekend, then? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Sun Fires Off Major..." (Score:2)
Thanks to slashdot, I was instinctively expecting something about Sun and Java or Oracle. Fires off angry letter to Google? Fires off Major Solaris update? MySQL 12?
began in December 2019 (Score:1)
Ahh... Corona virus...
Sun Fires Off Major (Score:1)
Oracle will not be amused.