Posted on 12/13/2010 8:36:03 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Dec. 13, 2010: On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big.
It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity.
"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martins Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."
For the past three months, Schrijver has been working with fellow Lockheed-Martin solar physicist Alan Title to understand what happened during the "Great Eruption." They had plenty of data: The event was recorded in unprecedented detail by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO spacecraft. With several colleagues present to offer commentary, they outlined their findings at a press conference today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
Explosions on the sun are not localized or isolated events, they announced. Instead, solar activity is interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances. Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections--they can go off all at once, hundreds of thousands of miles apart, in a dizzyingly-complex concert of mayhem.
(Excerpt) Read more at science.nasa.gov ...
at 10:25 approximately, just off center at about the one oclock position, the uss enterprise is seen ejecting out of the plasma inverted!
My first thought: the still of that image looks like an impressionist painting.
The eruption is beautiful and terrible.
The dems are probably going to raise taxes to fight solar eruptions.
Nice pic, JoeProBono. Those STEREO satellites are really hugh. Where did they get the materials? The asteroid belt? ;-)
TMI
The neutron count drops as the solar magnetic ejection protects the earth from galactic cosmic rays. A lower GCR level (lower neutron count) is associated with calmer weather (and possible amplification of global warming). A higher GCR level may mean global cooling over the long run. The upshot is stormy sun means less stormy earth but a small blip of stormy sun like this one has probably little or no effect.
........and that’s what I love about FR......... :D
Indeed.
Of course, not that *I* ever participated in a thread hijack. [coughmuchcough]
I mean [ahem] just because I have five different “thread is hijacked” graphics, it doesn’t mean... uh... Oh never mind.
The NASA video won’t play on my iPhone (it IS a .MOV file). Are you folks viewing this with Quicktime?
When I try to play the movie on my iPhone, I receive a message: “The server is not correctly configured”
Anyone else getting this?
No iPhone here....
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I tried to play the video, but it said I had to find something to enable it to be paid, and that is beyond my meager computer skills.
Maybe try link at #17.
Works for me with Linux Mint.
It makes me sad that until that happened, astrophysicists firmly believe that activity on the sun was localized, and that massive occurrences couldn’t happen.
My, how small the human brain thinks.
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