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Posts Tagged ‘coronal mass ejections’

Mysterious Solar Phenomenon We May Have To Worry About

September 23, 2012 1 comment

messagetoeagle

MessageToEagle.com – Coronal cavities are voids in coronal emission often observed above high latitude filament channels.

Sometimes, these cavities have areas of bright X-ray emission in their centers.

Now, NASA scientists focus on this mysterious phenomenon because it seems to be strongly related to dangerous coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
And CMEs, scientists have to worry about.


Click on image to enlargeThe faint oval hovering above the upper left limb of the sun in this picture is known as a coronal cavity. NASA’s Solar and Read more…

Sun Delivered Curveball Of Powerful Radiation At Earth Say UNH Scientists

February 2, 2012 Comments off
nanopatentsandinnovations
A potent follow-up solar flare, which occurred Friday (Jan. 17, 2012), just days after the Sun launched the biggest coronal mass ejection (CME) seen in nearly a decade, delivered a powerful radiation punch to Earth’s magnetic field despite the fact that it was aimed away from our planet.According to University of New Hampshire scientists currently studying and modeling various aspects of solar radiation, this was due to both the existing population of energetic particles launched by the first CME and a powerful magnetic connection that reeled particles in towards Earth from the Sun’s blast region, which had spun to an oblique angle.”Energetic particles can sneak around the ‘corner,’ as was the case in Friday’s event when it was launched at the Sun’s limb, or edge,” says astrophysicist Harlan Spence, director of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) and principal investigator for the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) instrument onboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission. CRaTER is designed to measure and characterize aspects of the deep space radiation environment.

Caption: Particle radiation from the Jan. 23, 2012 solar flare speeds away from the Sun along curved magnetic field lines (blue lines) and arrives before the coronal mass ejection (orange mass from the Sun) and its driven shock.

Image courtesy of Nathan Schwadron, UNH-EOS.
Space weather events can disrupt Earth-based power grids, satellites that Read more…

Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) Sept 4 to Sept 8

September 10, 2011 Comments off

Major NASA Solar Flare News Conference: New Observations On Solar Storm Impact On Earth

September 2, 2011 Comments off

nanopatentsandinnovations.blogspot

NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Sept. 7, to discuss new observations about solar flares that can impact communication and navigation systems.
A three and a half hour (0000 - 0330 UT) time lapse movie of the C4-class flare and filament event
Credit: SOHO/NASA
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is providing new data and images for scientists to better understand the sun’s dynamic processes, which can affect Earth. The spacecraft launched in February 2010.NASA recently made a breakthrough in sunspot and solar storm predictions.Based on data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), this movie shows a sunspot emerging from depth in February 2011.

Visualization credit: Thomas Hartlep and Scott Winegarden, Stanford University
› Download videoImagine forecasting a hurricane in Miami weeks before the storm was Read more…

A Strong M-class solar flare headed for Earth

August 4, 2011 Comments off

spaceweather

A solar wind stream flowing from the indicated coronal hole should reach Earth on Aug. 7th or 8th. Credit: SDO/AIA.

STRONG SOLAR ACTIVITY: For the third day in a row, active sunspot 1261 has unleashed a strong M-class solar flare. The latest blast at 0357 UT on August 4th registered M9.3 on the Richter Scale of Flares, almost crossing the threshold into X-territory (X-flares are the most powerful kind). The number of energetic protons around Earth has jumped nearly 100-fold as a result of this event. Stay tuned for updates.

INCOMING CLOUDS: At least two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are now en route to Earth, propelled toward us by eruptions in the magnetic canopy of sunspot 1261 on August 2nd and 3rd. Analysts at the GSFC Space Weather Lab have just produced a new 3-D model of the advancing CMEs. Click on the image to set the clouds in motion below:

Read more…

Solar Threat: We’ll Have Minutes to Respond; Government Plans Controlled Blackouts; Elite Contingency Plans

June 15, 2011 Comments off

shtfplan

While many will claim that solar storms are an unrealistic threat to our world, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom aren’t taking any chances.

According to a report put together by Alex Thomas of The Intel Hub, the threat is not only real, but very likely, and could change the world as we know it from one day to the next:

In a stunning announcement, The United States and United Kingdom are likely set to began “controlled” power cuts in preparation of a giant solar storm.

The announcement by Thomas Bogdan, the director of the US Space Weather Prediction Centre, comes a week after a large scale solar flare released a massive amount of radiation and threatened to cause moderate disruption.

The solar flare on June 7th, 2011 was luckily pointed away from Earth but caused Read more…

Explosive Solar Eruption May 10th

May 10, 2011 Comments off

NAM 12: Scientists see solar outburst in exquisite detail

April 21, 2011 Comments off

ras.org

The largest disturbances to the Earth’s geomagnetic environment occur when it is buffeted by solar material hurled in our direction by explosive changes in the Sun’s atmosphere. These Coronal Mass Ejections or CMEs contain approximately a billion tonnes of ionized gas or plasma and can have a dramatic and damaging impact on everything from satellites to power grids.

STEREO-CME

A visible light image of the CME as it travelled from the Sun towards the Earth on 20 March 2010 made with the HI instrument on the STEREO observatory. The x-axis of the image corresponds to a distance of 48 million km from left to right. Credit: Anthony Williams / NASA / Richard Harrison

Now a team of scientists have used two spacecraft to study these events in unprecedented detail. Graduate student Anthony Williams of the University of Leicester will present their results on Tuesday 19 April at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales.

Mr Williams and his team used the Heliospheric Imagers (HI) on the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft to examine the internal structure of an Earth-impacting CME – seen as sunlight scattered from high density blobs of plasma – as it travels outwards from the Sun. They compared this with the internal structure measured in situ by the Read more…

Huge Coronal Mass Ejection behind the Sun

March 29, 2011 Comments off

If we were in the path of this CME, it would have been very bad.

The STEREO (Ahead) spacecraft caught this bright, substantial coronal mass ejection blast that emerged from the far side of the Sun, out of direct view from Earth (Mar. 21, 2011). Because it was from the far side (from Earth perspective), none of the ejected particle cloud was headed towards Earth. When that active region rotates around again, we will see if its potential power for generating solar storms remains as strong.

“FEMA Requests Millions of Rations For ‘Catastrophic Disaster In New Madrid Fault System’”

February 8, 2011 6 comments
by Joe Quinn

 

“The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recently put out a tender or ‘Request For Information’ (RFI) for a LOT of emergency rations. The reason, in their own words, is: “to identify sources of supply for meals in support of disaster relief efforts based on a catastrophic disaster event within the New Madrid Fault System for a survivor population of 7M to be utilized for the sustainment of life during a 10-day period of operations”

Is there something they’re not telling us? It’s interesting to note that many of the recent animal ‘die-offs’ happened in the region of the New Madrid fault zone which stretches 150-miles (240 km) southward from Cairo, Illinois; through Hayti, Caruthersville and New Madrid in Missouri; through Blytheville into Marked Tree in Arkansas. It also covers a part of Read more…