On Sept. 19th, the STEREO-SOHO fleet of spacecraft surrounding the sun detected six coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Two of the clouds rapidly dissipated. The remaining four, however, are still intact and billowing through the inner solar system. Click to view a movie of their forecasted paths:
According to analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, who prepared the movie, one CME should hit Mercury on Sept. 20th at 05:40 UT while another delivers a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field on Sept. 22th at 23:00 UT. All impact times have an uncertainty of plus or minus 7 hrs. MagSphere will be hit hard.
here s the first one:
Event Issue Date: 2011-09-19 21:27:19.0 GMT
CME Arrival Time: 2011-09-21 22:57:39.0 GMT
Arival Time Confidence Level: ± 6 hours
Disturbance Duration: 8 hours
Disturbance Duration Confidence Level: ± 8 hours
Magnetopause Standoff Distance: 5.7 Re
Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:57:39 GMT
Thu, 22 Sep 2011 06:57:39 GMT
http://www.spaceweather.com/FOUR CMEs: On Sept. 19th, the STEREO-SOHO fleet of spacecraft surrounding the sun detected six coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Two of the clouds rapidly dissipated. The remaining four, however, are still intact and billowing through the inner solar system. Click to view a movie of their forecasted paths:
The Secret Lives of Solar FlaresSept. 19, 2011: One hundred and fifty two years ago, a man in England named Richard Carrington discovered solar flares.
Sunspots sketched by R. Carrington on Sept. 1, 1859. © R. Astronomical Society.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/19sep_secretlives/It happened at 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1st, 1859. Just as usual on every sunny day, the 33-year-old solar astronomer was busy in his private observatory, projecting an image of the sun onto a screen and sketching what he saw. On that particular morning, he traced the outlines of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of white light appeared over the sunspots; they were so bright he could barely stand to look at the screen.
Carrington cried out, but by the time a witness arrived minutes later, the first solar flare anyone had ever seen was fading away. It would not be the last. Since then, astronomers have recorded thousands of strong flares using instruments ranging from the simplest telescopes in backyard observatories to the most complex spectrometers on advanced spacecraft. Possibly no other phenomenon in astronomy has been studied as much.
After all that scrutiny, you might suppose that everything about solar flares would be known. Far from it. Researchers recently announced that solar flares have been keeping a secret.
“We’ve just learned that some flares are many times stronger than previously thought,” says University of Colorado physicist Tom Woods who led the research team. “Solar flares were already the biggest explosions in the solar system—and this discovery makes them even bigger.”
read more at
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/19sep_secretlives/