Sun Unleashes Another Solar Storm Aimed at Earth

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Within the next several days you may experience some disruptions with electronic equipment doing some strange things, especially satellite reception. Not to worry, it’s just the sun letting off a few billion tons of charged particles and is not harmful to living matter. :D

The solar eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, occurred yesterday at 1:24 a.m. EDT (0524 GMT) and sent charged particles streaking outward at 380 miles per second.
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Though to be honest those charged partials aren't harmful cause the earths magnetic fields is deflecting them.

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Article says the particles will reach us on Saturdayish...just in time for my trans-Pacific flight.
 
Great, when can we expect Oracle to release a patch to solve the problem?
 
"coronal mass ejection" sounds like physics porn speak.
 
Welp...there go all our satellites...I hope you bitches are ready for it to be 1855 all over again.

My power generator is steam powered...IS YOURS?!
 
We should send something up to the Sun to stop this crap. I know, I know...it's really hot there. That's why my plan has us going at night. ;)

I saw a news story about this.....why do they try and get people riled up over stuff we can't control.
 
http://www.spaceweather.com/

Yep. More media stupidity. Until we get a carrington class x flare hitting earth we shouldn't have any disruptions. Btw, the last carrington class flare that hit did take out 6 million peoples power back in 1989
 
From what I learned, two things will happen:

  1. If the charged particles from the CME (coronal mass ejection) are aligned with the polarity of Earth's magnetic field, it can cause worldwide catastrophic failures of our power grids and many electronic devices.
  2. If the charged particles from the CME are NOT aligned with the polarity of Earth's magnetic field, it will be dissipated in and around the planet's magnetic field, hopefully, causing no damage..

(If I got backwards, it's what I remember from Nova's special on the Sun that I watched recently.)

Let's just hope it's #2 and not #1. If I recall from Nova's special, the last time that happened was around the late 1800s or early 1900s. It hasn't happened again since then.

But, if you can imagine someone turning off the lights for a good portion of the world and possibly damaging any electronic devices, it can be a very bad thing to our modern society with all our technology we have around.
 
Lights out! I doubt it will do much.

Just a friendly reminder from our star that any day can be your last.

So embrace the day people! Have some fun tonight!
 
octoberasian said:
From what I learned, two things will happen:

  1. If the charged particles from the CME (coronal mass ejection) are aligned with the polarity of Earth's magnetic field, it can cause worldwide catastrophic failures of our power grids and many electronic devices.
  2. If the charged particles from the CME are NOT aligned with the polarity of Earth's magnetic field, it will be dissipated in and around the planet's magnetic field, hopefully, causing no damage..

(If I got backwards, it's what I remember from Nova's special on the Sun that I watched recently.)

Let's just hope it's #2 and not #1. If I recall from Nova's special, the last time that happened was around the late 1800s or early 1900s. It hasn't happened again since then.

But, if you can imagine someone turning off the lights for a good portion of the world and possibly damaging any electronic devices, it can be a very bad thing to our modern society with all our technology we have around.
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That's about right. If we had that massive solar flare today...well... not much electronics would be left oporational which were not shielded. And all power equipment would be fried. It's all part of the sun's solar cycle, and luck for the planet's orbit not to cross one of those ejections. Sooner or later though, odds are it should happen again.

It didn't matter much back then and made pretty lights in the sky, today...well, we'd know about it. ;)
 
spaceman said:
Lights out! I doubt it will do much.

Just a friendly reminder from our star that any day can be your last.

So embrace the day people! Have some fun tonight!
Click to expand...

Yep, and if the lights go out tonight, I'm going to have my candles and fireworks ready.
 
The only time the general public should worry is if the polarity of the solar storm is opposing our magnetic field. Instead of repelling the charged particles from the Sun , they would be further attracted to the poles and more of it would be absorbed by the atmosphere instead of being deflected by the magnetosphere.

But another thing that is often not referenced in these articles is that despite the event in the 1850's that the largest solar storm we've ever recorded , we have no idea how frequent such events are. They could be millions if not billions of years apart , such time tables are completely beyond our comprehension.
 
The avionics might do funny things like report the wrong air speed, but all should be good. :p

Watch an episode of Mayday while on the flight.
 
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