Another M6.6 Flare / Geomagnetic Storm - 02/18/2011 by Kevin VE3EN at 12:1 Another M6.6 Flare - Another strong M6.6 Solar Flare took place at 09:55 UTC Friday. SolarSoft data centers it around the new Sunspot 1161/1162 area, however C-Class and M-Class flares are bubbling up at a quick rate around both that area and Sunspot 1158. The M6.6 also triggered an R2 Radio Blackout.
Possible Secondary CME Impact - A secondary CME shock appears to have swept past the ACE spacecraft just after 10:30 UTC Friday. The solar wind spiked to near 700 km/s. Geomagnetic Storm conditions is now taking place at high latitudes. Be on the lookout for Aurora if you are in northern regions and dark outside.
Last edited by Carol on Fri Feb 18, 2011 11:33 am; edited 4 times in total
_________________ What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night, the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. With deepest respect ~ Aloha & Mahalo, Carol
This article is about disturbances within Earth's magnetosphere. For other uses of "magnetic storm", see Magnetic storm (disambiguation).
Solar particles interact with Earth's magnetosphere.
A geomagnetic storm is a temporary disturbance of the Earth's magnetosphere caused by a disturbance in space weather. Associated with solar flares and resultant solar coronal mass ejections (CME), a geomagnetic storm is caused by a solar wind shock wave and/or cloud of magnetic field which typically strikes the Earth's magnetic field 3 days after the event. The solar wind pressure on the magnetosphere and the solar wind magnetic field will increase or decrease depending on the Sun's activity. The solar wind pressure changes modify the electric currents in the ionosphere, and the solar wind's magnetic field interacts with the Earth's magnetic field causing the entire structure to evolve. Magnetic storms usually last 24 to 48 hours, but some may last for many days.[citation needed] In 1989, an electromagnetic storm disrupted power throughout most of Quebec[1] and caused aurorae as far south as Texas.[2]
_________________ What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night, the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. With deepest respect ~ Aloha & Mahalo, Carol
1) The South Atlantic magnetic anomaly is associated with the decreased protection from X-class flares.
2) When the Earth rotates US the Western Hemisphere into Sol's view, the x-rays will come too.
3) Attend to absorption rates in Western Hemisphere and at border regions of South Atlantic magnetic anomaly.
_________________ What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night, the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. With deepest respect ~ Aloha & Mahalo, Carol
* Solar cycle 24 just got started a few days back. The sun announced it with a major solar flare (Big Flare Portends Beginning of Solar Cycle 24).
Solar flares rise and fall on an 11-year cycle, and last year marked what scientists thought was the solar minimum. But through the beginning of 2009, the sun stayed unusually quiet. That changed yesterday, when a major sunspot appeared on the backside of the sun, where it was captured by NASA’s STEREO instrument.
“This is the biggest event we’ve seen in a year or so,” said Michael Kaiser, research scientist with the heliophysics division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “Does this mean we’re finished with the minimum or not? It’s hard to say. This could be it. It’s got us all excited.”
People have been counting sunspots since Galileo first observed one in the early 17th century. Through the 28 cycles that have been well-documented, stretching from 1745 to today, the average cycle length has been 11 years, but shorter and longer cycles have been observed. (The polarity of solar storms also alternates, so technically, a full cycle is 22 years.)
For unknown reasons, the current solar minimum has lasted longer than normal. “It’s been a long solar minimum, the longest and deepest one through the last hundred years, but not out of the extreme ordinary,” Kaiser said.
* The next solar maximum is in 2012. Will we see Corona Mass Ejections (CME) like that of 1859? FirstScience.com reports :
Scientists are finally beginning to properly understand a historic solar storm in 1859. One day, the storm, which was the most potent disruption of Earth’s ionosphere in recorded history could happen again.
Newly uncovered scientific data of recorded history’s most massive space storm is helping a NASA scientist investigate its intensity and the probability that what occurred on Earth and in the heavens almost a century-and-a-half ago could happen again.
In scientific circles where solar flares, magnetic storms and other unique solar events are discussed, the occurrences of September 1-2, 1859, are the star stuff of legend. Even 144 years ago, many of Earth’s inhabitants realized something momentous had just occurred. Within hours, telegraph wires in both the United States and Europe spontaneously shorted out, causing numerous fires, while the Northern Lights, solar-induced phenomena more closely associated with regions near Earth’s North Pole, were documented as far south as Rome, Havana and Hawaii, with similar effects at the South Pole.
What happened in 1859 was a combination of several events that occurred on the Sun at the same time. If they took place separately they would be somewhat notable events. But together they caused the most potent disruption of Earth’s ionosphere in recorded history. “What they generated was the perfect space storm,” says Bruce Tsurutani, a plasma physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
To begin to understand the perfect space storm you must first begin to understand the gargantuan numbers with which plasma physicists like Tsurutani work every day. At over 1.4 million kilometres (869,919 miles) wide, the Sun contains 99.86 percent of the mass of the entire solar system: well over a million Earths could fit inside its bulk. The total energy radiated by the Sun averages 383 billion trillion kilowatts, the equivalent of the energy generated by 100 billion tons of TNT exploding each and every second.
But the energy released by the Sun is not always constant. Close inspection of the Sun’s surface reveals a turbulent tangle of magnetic fields and boiling arc-shaped clouds of hot plasma dappled by dark, roving sunspots.
What transpired during the dog days of summer 1859, across the 150 million-kilometre (about 93 million-mile) chasm of interplanetary space that separates the Sun and Earth, was this: on August 28, solar observers noted the development of numerous sunspots on the Sun’s surface. Sunspots are localized regions of extremely intense magnetic fields. These magnetic fields intertwine, and the resulting magnetic energy can generate a sudden, violent release of energy called a solar flare. From August 28 to September 2 several solar flares were observed. Then, on September 1, the Sun released a mammoth solar flare. For almost an entire minute the amount of sunlight the Sun produced at the region of the flare actually doubled.
“With the flare came this explosive release of a massive cloud of magnetically charged plasma called a coronal mass ejection,” said Tsurutani. “Not all coronal mass ejections head toward Earth. Those that do usually take three to four days to get here. This one took all of 17 hours and 40 minutes,” he noted.
Not only was this coronal mass ejection an extremely fast mover, the magnetic fields contained within it were extremely intense and in direct opposition with Earth’s magnetic fields. That meant the coronal mass ejection of September 1, 1859, overwhelmed Earth’s own magnetic field, allowing charged particles to penetrate into Earth’s upper atmosphere. The endgame to such a stellar event is one heck of a light show and more – including potential disruptions of electrical grids and communications systems.
Back in 1859 the invention of the telegraph was only 15 years old and society’s electrical framework was truly in its infancy. A 1994 solar storm caused major malfunctions to two communications satellites, disrupting newspaper, network television and nationwide radio service throughout Canada. Other storms have affected systems ranging from cell phone service and TV signals to GPS systems and electrical power grids. In March 1989, a solar storm much less intense than the perfect space storm of 1859 caused the Hydro-Quebec (Canada) power grid to go down for over nine hours, and the resulting damages and loss in revenue were estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
After reading this section you will be able to do the following:
* Explain why radiation penetrates deeper into some materials than it does others. * Define half-value layer and how it can be used to compare the radiation absorption characteristics of a material. * Explain how radiation energy affects its penetrating power.
How deep will radiation penetrate into a material?
Now that we have looked at the interaction that the radiation has with matter, let's consider the radiation ability to penetrate materials. We know that one of the factors affecting ionization is the material type. We also know that radiation has a more difficult time penetrating dense materials, such as metal than it does less dense materials, such as plastic.
Radiation photons of the same energy will not penetrate a given material to the same depth. Some of the photons will collide with atoms and lose their energy before others. Some may pass completely through the material with minimal or no interaction. Also, the depth of penetration for a given photon energy is dependent upon material density (atomic structure). The more subatomic particles in a material (higher Z number), the greater the likelihood that interactions will occur and the radiation will lose its energy. Therefore, the more dense a material, the less the depth of radiation penetration will be.
When does the absorption of radiation start?
The absorption of radiation starts as soon as the radiation enters a material. The process is progressive and continues as the radiation penetrates deeper into the material. Additional energy is absorbed through the various processes of ionization. At some point in the material, there is a level at which the radiation intensity becomes one half that at the surface of the material. This depth is known as the Half Value Layer, (HVL) for that material. Each material has its own specific HVL thickness. Not only is the HVL material dependent, but it is also energy dependent. This means that for a given material, if the radiation energy changes, the point at which the intensity decreases to half its original value will also change.
How does radiation energy affect the depth of penetration?
If we raise the energy of the radiation interacting with the same material, the HVL will occur deeper in that material. X-rays and gamma rays with shorter wavelengths will have more energy that must be absorbed and, therefore, more energy will make it deeper into the material or through the material. Conversely, if we lower the radiation energy, the HVL will occur shallower in depth.
-- - - Review:
1. The more subatomic particles in a material the more quickly radiation energy will be absorbed resulting in less depth of penetration. 2. The half-value layer is the depth within a material where half of the radiation energy has been absorbed. The HVL is useful in making material comparisons. 3. Higher energy radiation will penetrate deeper into a material before it is absorbed.
_________________ What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night, the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. With deepest respect ~ Aloha & Mahalo, Carol
ANOTHER X-FLARE--ALMOST: Fast-growing active region 1161 erupted this morning, producing an M6.6-class solar flare at 1011 UT. The almost-X category blast was one of the strongest flares in years and continued the week-long trend of high solar activity. SOHO coronagraph images show no accompanying CME, so Earth effects should be minimal.
A Super Solar Flare May 6, 2008: At 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington—widely acknowledged to be one of England's foremost solar astronomers—was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw.
Right: Sunspots sketched by Richard Carrington on Sept. 1, 1859. Copyright: Royal Astronomical Society: more.
On that morning, he was capturing the likeness of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots, intensified rapidly, and became kidney-shaped. Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and "being somewhat flurried by the surprise," Carrington later wrote, "I hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled." He and his witness watched the white spots contract to mere pinpoints and disappear.
It was 11:23 AM. Only five minutes had passed.
Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii.
Sign up for EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS delivery Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted.
"What Carrington saw was a white-light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the sun," explains David Hathaway, solar physics team lead at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The explosion produced not only a surge of visible light but also a mammoth cloud of charged particles and detached magnetic loops—a "CME"—and hurled that cloud directly toward Earth. The next morning when the CME arrived, it crashed into Earth's magnetic field, causing the global bubble of magnetism that surrounds our planet to shake and quiver. Researchers call this a "geomagnetic storm." Rapidly moving fields induced enormous electric currents that surged through telegraph lines and disrupted communications.
"More than 35 years ago, I began drawing the attention of the space physics community to the 1859 flare and its impact on telecommunications," says Louis J. Lanzerotti, retired Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories and current editor of the journal Space Weather. He became aware of the effects of solar geomagnetic storms on terrestrial communications when a huge solar flare on August 4, 1972, knocked out long-distance telephone communication across Illinois. That event, in fact, caused AT&T to redesign its power system for transatlantic cables. A similar flare on March 13, 1989, provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station in Canada, blacking out most of the province and plunging 6 million people into darkness for 9 hours; aurora-induced power surges even melted power transformers in New Jersey. In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes. That may not sound like much, but as Lanzerotti noted, "I would not have wanted to be on a commercial airplane being guided in for a landing by GPS or on a ship being docked by GPS during that 10 minutes." read more at link http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringtonflare/ 7 C Flares (?) and 3 M class flares already today (2/18/11)
February 18, 2011 -- A long-awaited interplanetary shock, perhaps one of an ensemble of shocks, passed the ACE spacecraft about 0045 UTC on February 18. A sudden impulse followed about one hour later, measuring about 30 nT at Boulder. The storming is quite modest so far (0430 UTC), but likely to intensify as additional shocks pass by.
_________________ What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night, the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. With deepest respect ~ Aloha & Mahalo, Carol
Recent warnings by NASA that the Sun’s current lack of activity may soon come to an end with dire implications for the world’s power sector have refocused attention on the effort being made to harden the world’s electricity networks against electromagnetic interference. Here IFandP takes a look at the arguments and latest developments on this important subject. http://www.ifandp.com/article/005980.html
The point of greatest vulnerability in our electricity networks is the transformer. A simulation conducted by Metatech indicated that a geomagnetic storm roughly 10 times the strength of that seen in 1989 could melt the copper windings of around 350 of the highest voltage transformers in the US, effectively knocking out a third of the entire US power grid and impacting an area 10 times that of the 1989 storm. Furthermore, the large size of the damaged transformers would effectively prevent field repairs and in most cases, new units would have to shipped in from abroad, ensuring that their replacement would take weeks or even months. Given that other countries could also be adversely affected and that the majority of transformers are manufactured in Brazil, China, Europe and India, there is no guarantee that the US would be the first priority for resupply in such an event. Although the industry has weathered geomagnetic storms of the highest (K9) classification since 1989 with little impact on performance, thanks to specialised operating procedures, all these storms were much less intense than the 1989 storm.
This is about the expected inevidability of this happening, that NASA has warned about in addtion to new found IONIZED GAS CLOUD, not a dust cloud that our ENTIRE solar system has been sliding into since 2008. This Ionized Gas Cloud supplies electrically charged particles for an direct path of transmission from the sun to the earth which has not existed before. There is no past data to gage or judge the effects of this new development and we are NOW entering SOLAR MAXIMUM.
Just a side note here. Microwave ovens that are grounded make good faraday cages. The solar flare has just reached our region and it is so bright out in the sky where the sun is that it is blinding.
Basically, what is happening is a first, in our current history of solar flares as there is nothing to base on what is possible in Sun Cycle 24.
Quote Extraterrestrial Dust Cloud can turn into Hydrogen Cyanide by a chemical process when entering Earth's Atmosphere
Abstract from;
INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS PUBLISHING REPORTS ON PROGRESS IN PHYSICS Rep. Prog. Phys. 65 (2002) 1427–1487 PII: S0034-4885(02)04039-3 Astrophysical and astrochemical insights into the origin of life
Chemical processes in the gas phase in cold, quiescent clouds are predominantly ion–molecule reactions, powered primarily by cosmic ray ionization of H2. Calculated abundances of observed molecules match the observations rather well (e.g. Pratap et al (1997), Dickens et al (2000)), although the agreement depends on a limited range of parameters, such as the age of the cloud and the relative abundance of C and O in the gas. Note that physical parameters such as temperature and density may be determined directly from the molecular line emission. By far the most abundant molecule in these clouds is H2, and the most abundant carbon-containing species is CO, with CO/H2 of order 10−4.
Less abundant by another factor of 10−3–10−4 are molecules such as formaldehyde (H2CO), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), ammonia (NH3) and methylacetylene (CH3CCH). The chemistry of the cold ‘molecular clouds’ is characterized by the presence of species normally considered to be highly reactive, including radicals, ions and energetic isomers, as well as by very unsaturated species such as cyanopolyynes and related linear carbon chains (see table 1). The presence of these de-hydrogenated species in an overall very reducing environment is a result of the kinetics of low temperature, low density reactions in the gas phase; in particular, reactions that add carbon to molecules tend to result in the loss of hydrogen, and many hydrocarbon ions have barriers to re-hydrogenation by reaction with H2 (e.g. Herbst et al (1983)). The large values for the hydrogen isocyanide/cyanide (HNC/HCN) abundance ratio have also been considered to be a classic indicator of ion-molecule chemistry, making the detection of HNC in comets of special interest (e.g. Irvine et al (1998a)).
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK ALL OF THE MEMBERS OF GLB WHO GATHERED THIS DATA IN SOME OF THE THREADS THERE SO WE MAY PASS THIS INFORMATION ONTO OUR FORUM MEMBERS.
_________________ What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night, the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. With deepest respect ~ Aloha & Mahalo, Carol
