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Solar Cycles / Solar Flares / Coronal Mass Ejections / Solar Storms

You are right, Fenris;
the universe will cool down, mostly because of expansion ; eventually there will be occasional atoms, a few photons getting redder and redder due to red shift, and some galactic black holes at fantastically low temperatures;

the only way to survive would be as ethereal ghost beings.
And how you get to be one of those I don't really know.

Oh by the way it looks like being cloudy Wednesday night-

it would be nice to see the aurora again-
I saw it in about January 1992 in York...
curls of violet-grey light followed by green and red patches.
 
I have never seen the aurora before, only pictures. It looks spectacular and magical.
 
Earth buffeted by big solar flare
A gas cloud from one of the largest flares ever seen on the Sun has reached the Earth causing a magnetic storm that erupted and then faded quickly.
The disruption to the Earth's magnetic field was described as very severe.

Aurora - northern lights - caused by the charged particles from the Sun have been seen at night all over the globe.

The Sun is undergoing a surge of activity and currently has several large sunspot groups on its surface. More flares and disruption is expected.


One of the largest

According to scientists the flare is the third largest detected since regular solar monitoring began 25 years ago.

It is the strongest flare since 2001 which itself was the most powerful since 1989.

A less powerful flare, also in 1989, caused disruption of power grids in Canada.

Observations from the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (Soho) satellite, monitoring the Sun from a gravitational balance point closer to the Sun than the Earth, saw the so-called Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) rise from the Sun on Tuesday.

Estimates of its velocity suggested it was moving at 7.5 million kilometres a hour, about five times faster than usual.

According to Soho astronomer Paal Brekke, "The magnetic cloud slammed into the Earth's magnetosphere and created a G5 geomagnetic storm, the strongest category."

However, monitoring suggests that the storm weakened quickly.

Experts say this weakening was probably due to the CME's magnetic field which had a northward pointing magnetic component.

Had it been pointing south, they say, the result would have been a much more severe and long lasting geomagnetic storm.

This is because if a CME has a magnetic field pointing south it interacts more violently with the Earth's magnetosphere.

"So we were quite lucky," says Paal Brekke.

Compass swings

The geomagnetic storm has caused compasses to swing wildly.

The compass variation at the Lerwick geomagnetic observatory in Scotland changed by 5.1 degrees in only 25 minutes at about 0630 GMT.

Japan's space agency has announced that its Kodama communications satellite has been affected by the flare. It has been shut down with the hope it can be reactivated when the storm has passed.

Aurora have been reported from mid-western US. Observers say they have seen "lots of red streamers with almost daylight blue down on the horizon."
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Fenris said:
I have never seen the aurora before, only pictures. It looks spectacular and magical.
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I was lucky enough to see the Northern Lights while on a "stopover" at Goose Bay in Canada (RAF Nimrod).

I was treated to twenty minutes of the most jaw-dropping light show.
Curtains of rainbow colours.
subtle.
magnificent.

The local eskimo-type who was out on the airfield with me, said it was the best show he'd seen in thirty years.

I'll NEVER forget it.
 
Geomagnetic readings are very high at York uni as of 20.00 ut . Anyone lucky enough to see aurora outside their windows now? Lots of cloud here and we are very far south, but we did have two succesive years with a single display, but nothing seen here last year.


Looking out towards the n.w. I did in fact see the auroral glow, green this time, which lasted until around 02.00, impressive for this far south!
 
Solar storm surge 'not over yet'
Scientists are warning that the spurt of dramatic solar activity may not be over yet.
One astronomer described the two large gas clouds that reached the Earth earlier this week as 'unprecedented.'

However, experts say that although unusual, the events are not beyond the bounds of 'normal' solar activity.

They say the flares do not represent any significant change in our Sun's behaviour as there has only been 25 years of monitoring from space.

'Two big shots at us'

Earlier this week, aircraft traversing the north Atlantic were confined to a narrow corridor to minimise radiation exposure, and astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) took shelter in its most shielded section.

Two Japanese satellites malfunctioned and work had to stop on a Norwegian highway that relied on satellite positioning.

The Sun spots - areas of recent explosions that sent charged gas-clouds heading our way - have now moved so that the Earth in no longer in the 'line of fire.'

However, astronomers say that the Sun may not have finished with us yet.

Commenting on the solar events of the past few days John Kohl of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US, said: "It's like the Earth is looking right down the barrel of a giant gun pointed at us by the Sun...and it's taken two big shots at us."


"The Sun is really churned up. The timing of two very large X-class flares aimed directly at the Earth, occurring one right after another, is unprecedented.

"I have not seen anything like it in my entire career as a solar physicist. The probability of this happening is so low that it is a statistical anomaly."

Spacecraft shut down

As a precaution, astronauts Michael Foale and Alexander Keleri onboard the ISS spent 20 minutes per orbit in the Zvezda module - the most protected area of the station - while the ISS passed through high magnetic latitudes.

It is a routine procedure and astronauts have done it twice before - in April and November 2001.

En route to the Red Planet, the Mars Express spacecraft was hit by the cloud of charged particles but it was designed to withstand these events.

The Smart-1 mission, spiralling its way to the Moon, has suffered some disruption of its 'ion' engine.

At one point, the engine automatically shut down, but restarted itself later without problem.

Radiation monitors on other spacecraft in highly elliptical orbits had detected radiation, probably coming from the solar flare.

These spacecraft, XMM-Newton and Integral, are safe and fully operational.

In 2001, XMM-Newton survived the largest solar flare ever recorded, and mission scientists had no reason to be concerned about the effects of this week's events.

An astronomer at the University of Iowa has even managed to detect the 'sounds' made by the first storm - a clicking noise followed by a whoosh.

Donald Gurnett says the sounds of the solar flare were picked up on Tuesday by Nasa's Cassini spacecraft as it heads for a rendezvous with Saturn and its moons.
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Pics and links to more on page. Aurorae have been seen in Cornwall (but not by me!)
- click the link on this page.
 
The Sun Has Gone Crazy:OFFICIAL

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994321
Sun more active than for a millennium

09:00 02 November 03

The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium. The realisation, which comes from a reconstruction of sunspots stretching back 1150 years, comes just as the Sun has thrown a tantrum. Over the last week, giant plumes of have material burst out from our star's surface and streamed into space, causing geomagnetic storms on Earth.

The dark patches on the surface of the Sun that we call sunspots are a symptom of fierce magnetic activity inside. Ilya Usoskin, a geophysicist who worked with colleagues from the University of Oulu in Finland and the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, has found that there have been more sunspots since the 1940s than for the past 1150 years.

Sunspot activity
Sunspot observations stretch back to the early 17th century, when the telescope was invented. To extend the data farther back in time, Usoskin's team used a physical model to calculate past sunspot numbers from levels of a radioactive isotope preserved in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica.

Global warming
Ice cores provide a record of the concentration of beryllium-10 in the atmosphere. This is produced when high-energy particles from space bombard the atmosphere, but when the Sun is active its magnetic field protects the Earth from these particles and levels of beryllium-10 are lower.

There was already tantalising evidence that beryllium-10 is scarcer now than for a very long time, says Mike Lockwood, from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford.

But he told New Scientist that when he saw the data converted to sunspot numbers he thought, "why the hell didn't I do this?" It makes the conclusion very stark, he says. "We are living with a very unusual sun at the moment."

The findings may stoke the controversy over the contribution of the Sun to global warming. Usoskin and his team are reluctant to be dragged into the debate, but their work will probably be seized upon by those who claim that temperature rises over the past century are the result of changes in the Sun's output (New Scientist, print edition, 12 April 2003). The link between the Sun's magnetic activity and the Earth's climate is, however, unclear.

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters (in press)

Jenny Hogan
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Biggest solar flare ever recorded

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3242353.stm

Just as solar scientists thought the Sun may be winding down it unleashes the biggest solar flare ever recorded.
It was so energetic that it overloaded the detectors on satellites monitoring the Sun's surface.

The blast was accompanied with a gigantic gas cloud of billions of tonnes of superhot gas being ejected into space - some of it directed at Earth.

Researchers are saying that the Sun's current spate of activity - now 10 days in duration - is the most dramatic and intense ever witnessed on the Sun's surface.


Huge energy

Powerful solar flares are given an "X" designation. There was an X8 and an X3 event on Sunday.

On Monday, there was an X3 flare followed by smaller ones.


The gas cloud starts on its way
Last week there were X7 and X10 events that took place back-to-back.

Tuesday's flare went off the scale, researchers say it was "well above X20".

This would make it the most powerful ever recorded, surpassing the X20 flares of 2 April 2001 and 16 August 1989.

The major flares have come from sunspot region 486, now officially the most active solar region in recorded solar observational history.

Region 486 is being taken over the Sun's limb by solar rotation. Parts of the latest megaflare occurred beyond the limb.

Dr Paal Brekke, deputy project scientist for the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (Soho) Sun-monitoring satellite, told BBC News Online: "I think the last week will go into the history books as one of the most dramatic solar activity periods we have seen in modern times."
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:eek!!!!:

lazarinalover says:
oh good! that will be jolly! the only time we get a free firework show we pump the air full of our own

lazarinalover says:
f*ck you mother nature!
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:D
 
17/03/04 - News and city section

Day the sun nearly shut down earth

By Chris Millar, Evening Standard

A wave of massive explosions which erupted from the sun's surface was so powerful it came close to shutting down power grids and radio and mobile phone networks across the world.

The solar flare last November was more than twice as big as the previous recorded explosion - and so violent that satellite detectors were unable to record its true scale because they were blinded by its radiation.

It generated a massive stream of electrically charged particles and gas which rocketed across space at two million miles per hour, with the ability to cause unprecedented disruption to radio transmissions and navigation systems on earth.

Until now the size of the flare and the seismic waves which followed it was unknown, but scientists have discovered it dwarfed the previous biggest flare in August 1989, which plunged six million people in Quebec into an electrical blackout.

A team of scientists at New Zealand's University of Otago have said that it almost wreaked unimaginable destruction.

Their calculations showed the flare's X-ray radiation striking the atmosphere was equivalent to that of 5,000 suns, although they said none of it reached the earth's surface.

The flare was not on a direct course and harmful radiation was absorbed by the magnetosphere, a protective layer around the earth.

The flare came during a spell of extraordinary solar activity, when the sun produced a series of vast explosions.

As gas from the core of the sun was heated to millions of degrees, radiation and billions of tonnes of charged particles were pumped into space.

An accompanying aurora was seen over the skies of southern England. At the time one scientist described the power of the flare as being greater than "every nuclear warhead being detonated at once".
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http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/9676470?version=1
 
Posted 7/25/2004 12:45 AM



Sunspot grows to 20 times size of Earth

By Robert Roy Britt, SPACE.com

A sunspot group aimed squarely at Earth has grown to 20 times the size of our planet and has the potential to unleash a major solar storm.

The amorphous mix of spots, together called Number 652, has been rotating across the Sun and growing for several days. On Friday, it sat at the center of the solar disk.

Sunspots are areas of intense magnetic energy, cooler and darker than the surrounding surface of the thermonuclear furnace. Sometimes the magnetic fields let loose and huge amounts of radiation and charged particles are hurled into space.

The Sun's last bout of intense storminess occurred last fall, when a string of 10 major flares over two weeks knocked out satellites, damaged others, and forced the FAA to reroute airlines away from exposed polar routes.

No one can say if this sunspot group will let loose with a major storm, but it has the characteristics of a potentially big event.

"The implications of this spot have scientists on the edge of their seats," NASA said in a statement Friday. "If the active region generates coronal mass ejections (CMEs), massive explosions with a potential force of a billion megaton bombs, it will be a fairly direct hit to Earth and its satellites and power grids."

The Sun is now in a generally quiet period of a well-known 11-year cycle of activity. But sunspots and flares can occur at any time. Scientists do not fully understand why the spots appear or how they erupt.

The sunspot is clearly visible from Earth without a telescope. But don't look at the Sun without a proper, safe filter or other viewing technique, or permanent eye damage can result.
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http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-07-25-see-spot-storm_x.htm?csp=15
 
The Sun's been busy of late: anybody spotted the aurora?

Sunspot cluster ejects huge radiation storm
17:43 21 January 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Kelly Young

The Sun spewed forth a massive amount of radiation this week, causing brilliant auroras and a radio blackout.

Since 14 January alone, it has unleashed at least 17 medium and five large solar flares from a single sunspot cluster. Forecasters at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expect medium to high solar activity to continue until 23 January.

"Having so many big flares from one particular region of the Sun is quite something," says Bernhard Fleck, project scientist for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory satellite.

The X-rays produced by the flares did not rise to the level of the notorious solar storms of October and November 2003, but in terms of high-energy protons, this is the largest radiation storm since October 1989.

Magnetic fields
Solar flares occur when energy stored in magnetic fields above sunspots is suddenly released. In this case, the offending sunspot grew into a cluster eight times the diameter of Jupiter in about five days.

Solar activity typically follows an 11-year cycle. Scientists estimate that the Sun experienced its last peak in 2000. "Often the biggest events are in the falling part of the solar cycle," Fleck told New Scientist. "So this is actually not that surprising."

Effects of the solar storms were seen on Earth. Auroras produced by the increased solar activity were spotted over northern parts of Europe and North America and above New Zealand on 18 and 19 January. NOAA also received reports of communication blackouts.

Evasive action
Two major US airlines rerouted planes away from the polar areas to avoid additional radiation, said Bill Murtagh, a space weather forecaster for NOAA. Instruments on two of NOAA's satellites, SOHO and the Advanced Composition Explorer, were blinded by radiation contamination for several hours, and there are unconfirmed reports of problems on other satellites.

The eruptions also required evasive action aboard the International Space Station. The two-man crew, Leroy Chiao and Salizhan Sharipov, ducked for cover inside the bulkier Russian side of the station when their orbit took them through the worst of the storm. High doses of radiation can cause health problems: astronauts are more prone to cataracts later in life, for example.
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At New Scientist[/url]
 
weatherwars.info/index.php?n ... &arcmonth=
Link and website are dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2006051...0&category_id=&parent_id=0&arcyear=&arcmonth=


NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH NEWS RELEASE
Posted: March 6, 2006

he next sunspot cycle will be 30-50% stronger than the last one and begin as much as a year late, according to a breakthrough forecast using a computer model of solar dynamics developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Predicting the Sun's cycles accurately, years in advance, will help societies plan for active bouts of solar storms, which can slow satellite orbits, disrupt communications, and bring down power systems.

The scientists have confidence in the forecast because, in a series of test runs, the newly developed model simulated the strength of the past eight solar cycles with more than 98% accuracy. The forecasts are generated, in part, by tracking the subsurface movements of the sunspot remnants of the previous two solar cycles. The team is publishing its forecast in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
 
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Whitleys take on this big one

Sun April 25 Credit SOHO/MIDI
An exceptionally large sunspot has appeared on our side of the sun. Sunspot 875 is already the size of the planet Neptune and is continuing to grow. It has a "beta gamma" magnetic field and presently harbors energy for M Class, or intermediate, solar flares.

The spot has appeared during the solar minimum, and the presence of such a large spot during a time of relative solar inactivity suggests that scientists predicting that the next solar maximum, due in 2011 and 2012, will be a very intense one, are likely to be correct. They have theorized that the next max was likely to start early, and be preceeded by an unsettled minimum

The current sunspot is not expected to cause X-Class solar flares, but that could change if it grows dramatically. Should this happen, there could be an unusual opportunity to observe auroras in the lower 48 state
 
OK. We've got 5 years to get our shit together: how are we going to make some money out of this?

Solar flares will disrupt GPS in 2011
14:29 29 September 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Jeff Hecht

Navigation, power and communications systems that rely on GPS satellite navigation will be disrupted by violent solar activity in 2011, research shows.

A study reveals Global Positioning System receivers to be unexpectedly vulnerable to bursts of radio noise produced by solar flares, created by explosions in the Sun's atmosphere.

When solar activity peaks in 2011 and 2012, it could cause widespread disruption to aircraft navigation and emergency location systems that rely heavily on satellite navigation data.

Particularly intense solar activity occurs roughly every 11 years due to cyclic changes to the Sun's magnetic field – a peak period known as the solar maximum.

Solar flares send charged particles crashing into the outer fringes of the Earth's atmosphere at high velocity, generating auroras and geomagnetic storms.

Radio noise
Charged particles from solar flares also produce intense bursts of radio noise, which peak in the 1.2 and 1.6 gigahertz bands used by GPS. Normally, radio noise in these bands is very low, so receivers can easily pick up weak signals from orbiting satellites.

In 2005, however, Cornell University graduate student Alessandro Cerruti discovered a puzzling failure in GPS reception while operating a receiver at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Along with Paul Kintner, from the university's electrical engineering department, Cerruti traced the problem to a radio burst induced by a solar flare. They found that GPS receivers operated by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Brazilian Air Force experienced similar disruption during this burst of solar activity.

The researchers say the problem has escaped detection before because GPS systems have spread in popularity during a time of relatively low solar activity.

Drowned out
Discovering the disruption was surprising. "[Other] people will be surprised at the next solar maximum," Kintner says. Both the number and intensity of radio flares will increase and could drown out GPS signals during this period, he says.

This may be a problem for aircraft navigation. The FAA uses GPS receivers for air traffic control, which Kintner says "will certainly fail" during these intense solar flare radio bursts, which could cause signals to drop by up to 90%, for hours at a time. Although planes can fly without GPS, outages force the FAA to increase the distance between aircraft and slow take-offs and landings, delaying flights.

GPS is also used for emergency rescues and also to synchronise power grids and cellphone networks. One solution, says Kintner, would be to increase the strength of GPS signals. But this would mean redesigning GPS satellite hardware and software

Cerruti presented details of the problem at a meeting of the Institute of Navigation on 28 September. Details will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Space Weather.

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article ... print=true
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Navigation, power and communications systems that rely on GPS satellite navigation will be disrupted by violent solar activity in 2011, research shows.
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What a load of crud. You may as well say...'Things will be different in the future. In the end the sun will die'...

THIS JUST IN...

'Humans looking for second home...etc etc...'

Yawn.

Sorry it's late an all.... :shock:
 
ramonmercado said:
OK. We've got 5 years to get our shit together: how are we going to make some money out of this?

...One solution, says Kintner, would be to increase the strength of GPS signals. But this would mean redesigning GPS satellite hardware and software
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They've already figured it out: you'll have to buy new hardware and software.
 
We could find out where the knackered GPS systems will lead motorists to, and build cafes there. ;)
 
Does anyone know how sunspots were observed in the 1600s, particularly telescopically? Were there a lot of blind astronomers walking round afterwards? I appreciate that windborne dust could provide a filter for the chinese astronomers but am now intrigued as to how they were viewed.
 
Didn't Galileo go blind from examining the sun through his telescope?
 
AsamiYamazaki said:
Does anyone know how sunspots were observed in the 1600s, particularly telescopically? Were there a lot of blind astronomers walking round afterwards? I appreciate that windborne dust could provide a filter for the chinese astronomers but am now intrigued as to how they were viewed.
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You could use the telescope to forcus an image of the sun on a white surface, or a simple camera obscura could work.

It's possible to see some of the larger spots on a misty day with the naked eye, and I suppose someone could take a chance with a telescope.
 
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Well, a few will have guessed from my sig etc that by lord i love old Sol. He's at the heart of all life in our solar system, accounts for 99.85% of all mass therein, burns about 4 million tons of Hydrogen a second through nuclear synthesis and is generally an all around good guy. But he appears to be a little under the weather at the moment. The latest solar cycle isnt happening the way the cosmology eggheads had figured. The latest reports show a current sunspot is actually a stellar fossil, from cycle 23.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008 ... nkyear.htm

Now, im no doom-merchant - far from it - Ole Sol will keep on burning for the next few billion years, keep on giving about 1300ish watts per square metre to the earth, and all the other top stuff we've come to expect.

I thought it was high time we had a thread devoted to this crucial astronomical body.

www.spaceweather.com is the best website for all the latest info relating to Sol, from aurora watch to CME's to sunspots and all things inbetween.

So come on! If you get any interesting Sun related stories, why not post it here?
 
I wonder if it's current inactivity has anything to do with the huge new class defining flares we had during the 3 to 4 years before 2008. Having no big spots last year is a bit unnerving.
 
So there are no sun spots right now...but what does this actually mean for us? Does it affect the weather, tides? Or is it just scientists going 'oh, that's odd'.
 
hokum6 said:
So there are no sun spots right now...but what does this actually mean for us? Does it affect the weather, tides? Or is it just scientists going 'oh, that's odd'.
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"The longest minimum on record, the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715, lasted an incredible 70 years. Sunspots were rarely observed and the solar cycle seemed to have broken down completely. The period of quiet coincided with the Little Ice Age, a series of extraordinarily bitter winters in Earth's northern hemisphere. Many researchers are convinced that low solar activity, acting in concert with increased volcanism and possible changes in ocean current patterns, played a role in that 17th century cooling."

Taken from a larger article:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008 ... update.htm

It's still very early days for cycle 24, but the projected graphs (as in the article above), already need reconfiguring as 2009 is showing no upward trend in sunspot activity. Actually a few old cycle sunspots (as i mentioned in first post) are still appearing...
 
We could be lucky and have the effects of a quiet Sun cancel anthropogenic global warming....
 
Blankest year for a century

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009 ... inimum.htm

April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower.

2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.

Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%).

It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. CONTINUES AT LINK
 
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