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Move to Montana - it's never cloudy here. Then again, it's presently 13 degrees, significantly warmer than when I walked to school this morning and my nose froze shut.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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This is not even the sunspot maximum time. This is the time when the sun is supposed to be fairly quiescent. Is anyone else slightly worried about what might be happening inside the sun that we don't understand to cause these unprecedented flares? I don't think we want our star to start acting weird. It's rather important that it not change behavior dramatically, that is, if we'd like for the Earth to stay inhabitable and so on. I mean, it would sort of be nice if it would, from the point of view of our species staying alive not to mention all the other species here. Just thought I'd inject that little caveat into all the ooohing and aaaaahing that's going on. Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
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I don't know - I feel kind of lucky to be a witness to the sun's first major abberations in its billion-year life, don't you?
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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It's been overcast here ever since this major solar activity started. We may have had the best Aurora here in centuries and we would never see it.
I want a clear night with ribbons of green, blue and red rippling through the sky.
I really need to get back to the Yukon.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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Good Point Anne Kate. I'm not worried yet but if this keeps up for much longer, it could get very serious.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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Well...we really haven't been monitoring the sun all that long, have we? For all we know, it could be doing this at fifty- or hundred-year or even longer intervals.
Posts: 1041 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Well, if it is going to be extinction level, I'll feel privileged to be among the last of the human race Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Maybe it's gonna wipe out all our sensitive electronics while leaving us alive (those of us who survive the system crashes), and let us know rather belatedly what became of Atlantis, Mu, and so forth... Posts: 1041 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Bring it on! I may be a pale, scrawny computer programmer with no survival skills at all, but there's a part of me that thinks I was born many hundreds of years too early.
Oh! I do have one survival skill! I know how to load, fire, clean, and manufacture ammunition for a brown bess musket! Bring it on crazy post-apocolyptic nuclear zombies!
Oh, and by the way, I lay claim to all lands on the western side of the Connecticut river. It shall be the New Territories of Vermont!
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Yeah Anne Kate, my wife and I have been talking about that. I find it unsettling, but I agree with those who have said that we haven't been monitoring the sun long enough to have a very good context in which to place what's happening. I would rather that the sun would just behave as it normally does though.
Given that it's doing this, though, I'm hopeful that one of the things I want to do before I die--see the Northern Lights--will happen soon, without my having to head north.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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By the way, check out the second picture on the page I linked to above--the one captioned "The gas cloud starts on its way". The gas cloud looks startlingly like a baby's face to me.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:Move to Montana - it's never cloudy here. Then again, it's presently 13 degrees, significantly warmer than when I walked to school this morning and my nose froze shut.
That's a bit colder than our 70 something yesterday. Posts: 851 | Registered: Oct 2001
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I would rather not mimimize the potential danger of the sun going even a little bit postal. If the sun merely increases its output of heat by 1% for a few weeks, the effects on earth could be catastrophic.
Saying that maybe this is something that regularly occurs, and we just didn't know it because we haven't been keeping records long enough, is not adequate to provide reassurance. Maybe 500 years ago a significant increase in solar heat output might have passed relatively unnoticed. But now we have millions of people living within 10 feet of sea level along the coasts, in the Florida Keys, in Amsterdam, and other places all around the world. Already in recent years huge chunks of the Ross Ice Shelf (in Antarctica) the size of Rhode Island have broken off. If enough breaks off and falls into the sea, that alone could raise sea level around the world. If a major part of it broke off all at once, it could send huge tsunamis around the world from one pole to the other. And if a significant amount of ice melts off the Antarctic glacier, that would represent a significant weight change pressing down on the earth's lithosphere, and the altered hydraulic balances could cause vastly increased earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, even large scale land mass movement, around the world as the planet equalizes pressure.
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001
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So, excepting the nutty "The End of the World is at Hand" focused Christians, what would be the point of worrying about the sun? What are we going to do, fire a huge antacid pill into the sun while crying "Woah, easy there big fella."?
If solar maintenance doesn't fall into the "serentity to accept the things I can't change" box, I don't know what does.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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So, unless there's something you can do to fix it, you'd rather not know if something is potentially dangerous, then? You'd rather just find out when it happens? If so then I won't warn you about things like that. I'll just mention it to these other people who might be interested, though, okay? Keep your eyes closed for a this next part, okay?
What has happened so far will not endanger anyone, but it does mean we don't understand what's going on inside the sun. It means there will be a slight increase in charged particle flux into the earth's atmosphere, of higher energy particles. That, if anything, will cause a slightly elevated rate of cancer and a miniscule amount of warming. Probably nothing we could even pick up statistically.
But the sun doesn't do this. It may have done it in prehistoric times when we have no records, but if it did it also might have heralded the onset of higher solar variability, perhaps bringing major climate changes (which we also know have occurred with fair regularity), or other things which might have happened in earth's history before but nevertheless could be huge catastrophes from our point of view. It could also herald something different and new. That's what it means to not know. We don't understand so we really can't say.
The magnitude of the burps is quite enormous by our standards. Each of these little black spots on the sun's surface is about the size of the whole earth. When you're hanging around a mere 1 AU (astronomical unit) from a star that's making unusual burping events the size of your whole planet, it's sort of like standing on the edge of the crater of an erupting volcano saying, "ooooh, coooool!" I think sometimes that the rest of the universe outside the surface of the earth is somehow unreal to most people. We most assuredly are here. <Huge arrow pointing to tiny bit of rock in the void> It IS cool, that the sun is doing this, but it's also a bit scary as well.
[ November 06, 2003, 01:46 PM: Message edited by: ana kata ]
Posts: 968 | Registered: Sep 2003
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sweet jebus. Auroras in the middle of the day here in NH. I took some photos. Will post after I eat lunch. o_O
Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
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The way I feel about what our sun is doing is this:
It's unsettling. We don't have enough data to know whether it's part of a historical pattern or not, or to know whether it is the beginning of a process that will make life here either unplesant or impossible. Right now we don't have the technology to do anything about it if the sun is getting ready to make things unplesant here, but I wouldn't be surprised if, given a hundred years warning or so, we couldn't develop technologies that could help us, either by playing around with the sun itself or by getting some portion of terrestrial life to colonies either further out from our sun, or in another solar system entirely. I'd be very leery of experimenting on our sun, of course.
In any case, I recognize that there isn't much we can do to fix things for ourselves in the immediate future if the sun decides to make things interesting, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to know about it.
Oh, and I would really, really love to see some of the auroras all of this activity is producing. So far, though, it's been overcast everytime they've been a possibility.
I wouldn't want to experiment with *our* sun, but I wonder if it would be possible to create a big electromagnetic spoon to stir up aging stars and get their reactions going properly again?
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Isn't there a lunar eclipse Saturday night? Also some wiggy planet alignment thing. I better get that crystal shard thingme out of my storage unit.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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We are not in the quiescent portion of the solar cycle. The 11 year peak was 2 years ago, so we should normally be on the downslide right now.
Also, the solar peak has to do with the number of sunspots, not intensity of them. Actually, for aurora activity, that usually peaks on either side of the sunspot peak, so we aren't too far off there either.
As to the size of this particular flare, we've known about sunspots since Galileo, but we haven't been measuring them with any accuracy for more than a couple of decades. At 11 years per cycle, that really doesn't give us much to go on.
The only huge ones we have traditionally been aware of are the ones that were earth directed, and caused big auroral storms. For historical reference, the auroral storm of 1859 dwarfs anything we've seen as a result of this recent activity, but since we don't have a measurement of the flare that caused it, we can't really compare them, now can we?
Note, this "record breaking" flare was not earth directed, it's not even supposed to cause any unusual auroral activity. Some activity, yes, but not unusually strong (and you can't see auroras in the daytime folks, even strong ones are washed out by moonlight). Most Coronal Mass Ejections are not earth directed, so it's possible the sun has been doing this on a regular basis, and we just never noticed it.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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No doubt the sun is signaling that it is Ice Age time, and we should begin pumping out massive amounts of greenhouse gases if we don't want to freeze our buns off. Posts: 1041 | Registered: Feb 2002
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It's been overcast here ever since this major solar activity started. We may have had the best Aurora here in centuries and we would never see it. ![[Cry]](graemlins/cry.gif)
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