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Super flares of 2013
BREAKING NEWS I have just updated this blog, since NASA has just announced a huge solar flare explosion due next week ( Feb 21-28th 2013). This flare is 6 times the size of the earth. It was just discovered a mere 48 hours ago.So this is a timely blog if I do say so. Here is the press release:
NASA: A colossal sunspot on the surface of the sun is large enough to swallow six Earths whole, and could trigger solar flares this week, NASA scientists say.
The giant sunspot was captured on camera by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory as it swelled to enormous proportions over the 48 hours spanning Tuesday and Wednesday (Feb. 19 and 20). SDO is one of several spacecraft that constantly monitor the sun’s space weather environment.
“It has grown to over six Earth diameters across, but its full extent is hard to judge since the spot lies on a sphere, not a flat disk,” wrote NASA spokeswoman Karen Fox, of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in an image description.
Here we go again ! As if meteors slamming into earth were not enough to make one feel they had been tele-ported into a 1950’s era SciFi Movie.The CME’s are coming says NASA. CME is short for what they call a Coronal mass eruption and it pays to take notice of this term.You will see why as you read through this blog post. We may not have a choice as to what is being served by the speckled waiter in the sky, Monsuer Soleil AKA the sun. You see, the sun is throwing hissy fits lately, producing large eruptions of energy called solar flares. Can they kill you? Not in the way you would think.There is little chance of people burning up as has been portrayed in a number of sci fi movies. But there have been such occurrences in the past and they have knocked out whatever technologies Man has invented.And 2013 may well be a year to remember as far as the cosmos being the noisy neighbor from above.
Solar flares are no stranger to our planet, nor to civilization. Legends, myths and fables are littered with stories of stones, strange light, objects from the sky falling with no explanation. But is there any evidence to support the idea that Solar Flares have impacted our environs? In short, yes. The rather new and exciting developments of some archo- climatologists are shedding sunshine on the strange history of solar flares….I have borrowed some notes from various sources to illuminate the gentle reader. And as the saying goes, nothing new under the sun….
First things first. Science cannot predict many meteors.They simply do not have the technologies able to spot meteors like the one that hit the Ural mountains of Russia.Nor could science predict the other meteors witness over San Franciso and Cuba last week. Science even got lucky finding the asteroid that came close to us days ago.And CME’s are just as tricky to predict.The one coming looks enormous, so maybe a quick study of historic solar flares is in order.We will start with a CME I witnessed in Paris in 2000. I was staying at the Bastille hotel. Actually, I did not witness it, since it was invisible, and frankly, I did not notice it as it occurred.But it happened and more of the same seems to be on the way….
2000: The Bastille Day EventThe Bastille Day event takes its name from the French national holiday since it occurred the same day on July 14, 2000. This was a major solar eruption that registered an X5 on the scale of solar flares.
The Bastille. I remember dining late that night,ala fresco, oblivious to the flare..enjoying a glass of nice wine, like everyone else in Paris that balmy evening…
But the mysteries of the sun date back to the beginnings of our world,and are deeply ingrained in the human experience.
Since the beginning of human existence, civilizations have established religious beliefs that involved the Sun’s significance to some extent or other. As new civilizations developed many spiritual beliefs were based on those from the past so that there has been an evolution of the sun’s significance throughout cultural development. Even as late as the 17th century the development of tarot cards for fortune telling included a card that represents the Sun’s influence on the life of man.
If we look closely into history, we see that the religious beliefs of the very first civilization, the Sumerians,were consumed by the movement and expression of the sun…A land of blazing hot summers and precious little shade,Sumer was the “Hell’s kitchen” of the Middle East. While the Sumerian’s Sun god wasn’t the most powerful deity in their culture it initiated the development of future Sun worship. Over the centuries the Sumerian Sun god’s influence grew while other god’s influence diminished.
By the time the Egyptian civilization was at its peak, the Sun god had reached a supreme position. However, Sun worship reached its height and most involved form with the Aztec, Maya, and Inca civilizations of South America. The Inca culture was totally based on worship of the Sun.And by the 16th century, the gleaming armor of arriving colonialists in the 16th century surely caused the native peoples to tremble and deify the conquistadors..
Something big happened in the year A.D. 774.
Scientists studying tree rings found a sharp increase in the amount of radioactive carbon-14 recorded in the rings of ancient Japanese cedar trees between 774 and 775. Carbon-14 can be created by cosmic ray particles arriving from space, but what causes such cosmic ray increases?
At first, experts were at a loss to explain the event, and the team that unearthed the tree ring data last year dismissed the sun as a possible explanation.
Now a new team of scientists argues that a solar flare is the most likely culprit.
Blast from the sun
The sun could have released a huge and powerful blast of plasma into space called a coronal mass ejection, which, when it hit Earth, could have sparked the creation of carbon-14, suggest astrophysicists Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas and Brian Thomas of Washburn University, also in Kansas, in a paper published the Nov. 29 issue of the journal Nature.
Carbon-14 is a variant of the normal form of carbon (carbon-12) that is common on Earth and throughout the universe. When cosmic ray particles hit Earth’s atmosphere, they can produce showers of particles such as neutrons. Some of these neutrons, in turn, hit the nitrogen nuclei that are rife in the atmosphere, and a chemical reaction occurs that transforms the nitrogen into carbon-14.
This carbon variant is unstable and decays with a half-life of about 5,730 years (meaning half of any amount of carbon-14 will be gone in that time). For this reason, it’s a useful date marker: A tree, for example, will stop absorbing carbon once it dies, so the amount of carbon-14 left in it is a reliable indicator of how old it is.
It had been widely known that a jump in carbon-14 occurred in the eighth century, but researchers first pinpointed this rise and fall on a year-to-year basis by looking at tree rings in a paper by Fusa Miyake of Japan’s Nagoya University and colleagues, published in the June 14 2012 issue of Nature.
“They found that whatever made that carbon-14 bump happened really fast, and took less than one year, which called out for some really major, powerful event,” Melott told SPACE.com.
The Japanese researchers considered that it might be a solar flare, but calculated that it would have had to have been thousands of times more powerful than the greatest one ever known, which made such a scenario unlikely.
Now, in a new calculation, Melott and Thomas say a solar flare is a reasonable explanation.
“Their mistake was, they assumed that the energy shot out by the sun in one of these coronal mass ejections goes out in all directions, like the light from a light bulb, but in fact it’s kind of shot out in blobs,” Melott said. In other words, there was a staggered emission of CME, which, in my view must change the very way in which we view such events.
That adjustment meant that a solar flare need have been only about 10 or 20 times more powerful than the greatest flare on record, the so-called Carrington event of 1859. You will find the events of 1859 amazing, in that the event was at first heralded as a spectator event, and later feared as the extent of damage was calculated. Could such an event, in 2013, cause dreaded grid failure? You decide. And now for the BIG EVENT….
Carrington Super Flare
From August 28, 1859, until September 2, numerous sunspots and solar flares were observed on the sun. Just before noon on September 1, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed the largest flare, which caused a major coronal mass ejection (CME) to travel directly toward Earth, taking 17.6 hours. Such a journey normally takes three to four days. This second CME moved so quickly because the first one had cleared the way of the ambient solar wind plasma.
On September 1, 1859, Carrington and Richard Hodgson, another English amateur astronomer, independently made the first observations of a solar flare. Because of a simultaneous “crochet”observed in the Kew Observatory magnetometer record by Balfour Stewart and a geomagnetic storm observed the following day, Carrington suspected a solar-terrestrial connection. Worldwide reports on the effects of the geomagnetic storm of 1859 were compiled and published by Elias Loomis which support the observations of Carrington and Balfour Stewart.
On September 1–2, 1859, the largest recorded geomagnetic storm occurred. Aurorae were seen around the world, even over the Caribbean; those over the Rocky Mountains were so bright that their glow awoke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning. People who happened to be awake in the northeastern US could read a newspaper by the aurora’s light.
Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases shocking telegraph operatorsTelegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire.Some telegraph systems continued to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.
On September 3, 1859, the Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser reported, “Those who happened to be out late on Thursday night had an opportunity of witnessing another magnificent display of the auroral lights. The phenomenon was very similar to the display on Sunday night, though at times the light was, if possible, more brilliant, and the prismatic hues more varied and gorgeous. The light appeared to cover the whole firmament, apparently like a luminous cloud, through which the stars of the larger magnitude indistinctly shone. The light was greater than that of the moon at its full, but had an indescribable softness and delicacy that seemed to envelop everything upon which it rested. Between 12 and 1 o’clock, when the display was at its full brilliancy, the quiet streets of the city resting under this strange light, presented a beautiful as well as singular appearance.” rather poetic imagery. They politely forgot to mention the telegraph operators that were burned alive.
Similar events
American’s , as in Meso Americans also have their solar legends. Rock art designs in the Americas are often identical to those in locations around the world. Does this suggest ancient peoples were in direct contact with one another or could there be another explanation? Physicist Anthony Peratt has a bold new theory that argues the similarities are not based on contact but the result of witnessing and recording the same high energy auroral activity taking place in the sky. These auroras were the result of a massive solar flare which was intense enough to not only produce designs in the sky but also to literally cause bodies of water to boil. Native American legends appear to record just such an event sometime in the past. Is this also the origin of the Mesoamerican and Hopi belief in a series of world ages called Suns that each ended in massive destruction of human civilization? Could the “jealous sun” as sting calls it, bring a road raged Apollo and his chariot crashing down to earth, ready to mess with our connectivity? My son, his Ipad, and the rest of our friend and family hope not…….
My guess is that 2013 will be one for the record books and if anything, these challenges with birth new technologies. After all, we invented sun screen Right? Thomas Schoenberger