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An eruption from the Sun that happened today
- ryandvm 15y agoHot
- mirkules 15y agoFirst reaction: that's it?? Second reaction: wait, this was big enough to engulf the Earth. Cool!
- Postscapes 15y agoAlthough not the flare from today, here is an image that has the earth shown against one of these eruptions for scale: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/515512main_prominence_Earthscale-033010-orig_full.jpg http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/515512main_prominence_Ear...
- mirkules 15y agoHonestly, when we start talking about these huge distances and the vastness of space, the scale of things just seems to lose all meaning. Maybe it's because most of us are engineers and these sorts of numbers only exist in our heads in abstract terms, but I find that I really have to look around me and ground myself in relative terms before I can fully grasp how mind-bogglingly huge that is.
- jnorthrop 15y agoForgive my ignorant question, but what if that eruption was aimed at us? Was that a mass ejection of something? If so, could that something have ruined the electronics in orbiting satellites or stripped our atmosphere? Maybe I'm over-reacting but that appears to be an absolutely massive explosion.
- iclelland 15y agoProbably not much. According to the blog, this was a lower-energy explosion than, say, this one[1], which was aimed right at us. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=himC51J23vQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=himC51J23vQ
- JackWebbHeller 15y agoThis was a 'coronal mass ejection'. Inevitably, you're right - particles will no doubt make their way towards us. These incoming particles will probably cause an increase in Northern/Southern Lights (Aurora Borealis/Australis). The earth has a 'Van Allen Radiation Belt' surrounding it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_Belt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_Belt - which takes magnetically charged particles, often fired from the sun, and blasts them back down to earth. Upon impact with the planet's atmosphere, beautiful Auroras can be created. However, satellites can't orbit anywhere nearby the Van Allen Belt, as obviously these radiating particles can damage sensitive instruments. I'd guess by the size of this mass ejection, a geomagnetic storm will be created. Wikipedia has a good list of the various negative effects of these things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm#Geomagnetic_storm_effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm#Geomagnetic_s... Of course, it depends on the direction the eruption was aiming as a primary factor. This wonderful image - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Magnetosphere_rendition.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Magnetosphere_rendition.jp... - shows a perfect example of the Van Allen Belt. If you tip your head 90 degrees to the left, it kind of looks like an angel around earth - the 'halo area' is the main Van Allen Belt loop causing Auroras by firing the particles towards each polar cap. (Disclaimer: I have an interest in astronomy, but nothing to put to my name except for a B-grade Astronomy GCSE - it's likely much of that explanation is scientifically inaccurate, but, I tried my best! :)
- jws 15y agoIt takes on the order of three days to reach Earth.
- jeromec 15y agoIf you tip your head 90 degrees to the left, it kind of looks like an angel around earth - the 'halo area' is the main Van Allen Belt loop causing Auroras by firing the particles towards each polar cap. That reminds me of the passage in the Bible claiming four angels standing at corners of the earth. Not to get into a theistic thread or anything, but who needs religion when science is that stunning? Beautiful imagery!
- 15y ago
- mturmon 15y agoFlares and CMEs can certainly cause damage to electronics or to astronauts. It is believed that the CPU outage that caused the loss-of-pointing of the Galaxy IV satellite that in turn caused the giant pager outage in 1998 (about 80% of US pagers failed) was due to solar flares and CMEs. It's also conjectured that flares cause many other satellite electronics failures: http://books.google.com/books?id=nmdfazhEWzsC&pg=PA122&dq=pager+outage+galaxy+panamsat&hl=en&ei=EO_uTfKMLYWosQOS2ZmABw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=nmdfazhEWzsC&pg=PA122&#... The general phenomenon is called "Space Weather". There is a monitoring center in Boulder, CO, run by NOAA, called the Space Weather Prediction Center (http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/), that tries to predict and assess space weather. They use physical models and observational data, but it's not nearly as evolved a science as numerical weather prediction.
- qq66 15y agoIs this sped up?
- iclelland 15y agoYes. I couldn't see it at first, because of the advertising overlay, but there is a time readout in the lower-left of the video. It looks like it's sped up about 60x.
- jamie_ca 15y agoyou mean 3600x. It looks to me like it's ticking the hours past at about one a second.
- checker 15y agoIs anyone able to slow this down? I realize they wanted an explosion effect but it goes too fast for me.
- walrus 15y agoyoutube-dl -o sun Hyi4hjG6kDM # [1] mplayer -speed 0.25 sun [1] http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/ http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/. It's available in the Arch Linux and Ubuntu repositories, as well.
- pyre 15y agoget_flash_videos[1] covers more sites and has a plugin infrastructure, though I haven't personally written a plugin. [1] http://github.com/monsieurvideo/get-flash-videos http://github.com/monsieurvideo/get-flash-videos
- setenta 15y agoAccording to one of the comments on the blog, the video frames come from Helioviewer: http://helioviewer.org/?date=2011-06-07T07:20:00.000Z&imageScale=2.4&imageLayers=[SDO,AIA,AIA,304,1,100] http://helioviewer.org/?date=2011-06-07T07:20:00.000Z&im... The whole explosion takes around three hours.
- scott_s 15y agoThe blog post with more explanation: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-a-huge-explosion/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/th...
- 3pt14159 15y agoFrom that article it says "A good flare can release up to 10% of the Sun’s total energy" but they mean power, not energy, right? Because 10% of the sun's total energy released in that time frame would wipe us out, right?
- ars 15y agoPower isn't correct either, because power for how long. I can't figure out what they mean.
- barredo 15y agoI'd guess by '10% of total energy' they mean '10% of the total energy output in that period of time is released just in the area of the _flare_'
- teamonkey 15y agoCorrect. Flares can have an energy around the order of 10% of the total average energy output for the sun per second. [Edit] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flare > A solar flare is a sudden brightening observed over the Sun surface or the solar limb, which is interpreted as a large energy release of up to 6 × 10^25 joules of energy[1] (about a sixth of the total energy output of the Sun each second).
- 3pt14159 15y agoPower is outside of the realm of time. P = E/t, so that's why I assumed power. For example, say the sun produces 384 yottawatts, that would be 384 yottajoules per second. Say the flare goes on for 6000 seconds and uses an average of 38 yottawatts, or 228,000 yottajoules over that time period (fun fact, yotta is where SI stops. Strange.)
- skrebbel 15y agoDamn, I read "One of the coolest eruptions from Sun you'll ever see. This happened today." I was like finally, closures in java!
- fauigerzigerk 15y agoThe Sun you mean is now a white dwarf inside a black hole. If you want to know when you might find closure, you need to ask an Oracle ;-)
- bostonpete 15y agoI wish points were visible so I could see how many upvotes this got. Didn't point visibility get put to a vote by pg not long ago -- last I saw the "yes" votes were way ahead. (?)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- skrebbel 15y agoNot sure which 'this' you're referring to, but my joke is now at 38 points. Does it really matter? They're just points. And don't worry, i'm still not able to downvote people :)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- swah 15y agoDidn't hear a thing.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoVery cool. Its amazing what we don't know about the star sitting just 8 light minutes away from us. For jnorthrop generally these events are effectively deflected by the Earth's magnetosphere, however we don't know what we don't know. Its hard to estimate whether or not any one of the extinction events this planet has experienced over the past was caused by solar activity. I would hope it would add impetutus to efforts to surviving large changes in the Earth's envioronment by creating completely controlled environments (ideally across several planetary bodies) but I have low expectations that it will. One of the science stories I've been following for a while has been the growing body of evidence that a magnetic pole reversal [1] is becoming more likely. (Note there was a hoax around it changing instantly in 2012 which has been pretty thoroughly debunked). One thing that is pretty well understood is that during reversals the magnetosphere is greatly reduced [2] which suggests that the simulataneous occurence of a CME and a reversal of the poles resulting in a reduced magnetosphere would be something to write home about. [1] http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/29dec_magneticfield.html http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/29dec_magnet... [2] http://www.off-ladhyx.polytechnique.fr/people/willis/papers/Nature425.pdf http://www.off-ladhyx.polytechnique.fr/people/willis/papers/...
- code_duck 15y agoIt's amazing what we don't know about things sitting just a few light seconds away at most, too, such as the depths of the oceans or the spiders in my backyard. I think they're working on the 'bases on other planetary bodies' backup plan, but it will be a few years.
- burke 15y agoJust FYI, The circumference of earth is roughly 4 * 10^7 metres, and the speed of light is 3 * 10^8 m/s, so light can actually circle the globe almost 7.5 times per second. The depths of the oceans are just a few milliseconds away (40ms -ish?).
- code_duck 15y agoI figured it was something like that. Certainly explains why my ping to London is under 100 ms, right?
- mmaunder 15y agoYou'd have to line up 100 Earth's end-to-end to fit inside the Sun. This was reportedly about the size of the Sun itself, so it would engulf 100 Earths. It would probably destroy more since even planets on the periphery would have all life destroyed.
- ars 15y agoIt's big, but it's also dilute. It would not destroy any planets even if they were right inside it.
- jedbrown 15y agoThis statement, taken literally, is absurd. What are you trying to say?
- mmaunder 15y ago...that he's absurd. I'm pretty sure exposing our troposphere to 6000K would hurt a little.
- ars 15y agoIt would do nothing. We expose the atmosphere to 6000K every day in forges and nothing bad happens. The reason of course is the temperature doesn't matter - total energy does. And even though it's very hot, and very large, there is very very very little matter there, so the total energy is quite minimal.
- agilo 15y agoI wish there was a way on HN to easily find out submissions that have videos in them. Often times, especially when I'm eating at my desk, I'd rather watch interesting videos than read articles, and such a feature would be of great help on HN. Maybe there's a way that you guys know of (besides reading cues from the title)?
- nitrogen 15y agoYou could possibly use the HNSearch API or HN Firehose Twitter feed to get all the top stories, then check their target URLs for common video types.
- sorbus 15y agoThe standard convention is to put [video] in the title - a convention which is sadly being ignored here, along with the inexplicable use of a URL-shortener. It should be possible to locate all submissions so marked as videos with HNSearch (it's down at the moment, for some reason, so I can't verify this). EDIT: HNSearch is back up, searching for "[video]" or "video" in stories seems to show only links to videos on the first page when sorted by relevance, 8 out of 10 results when sorted by points, and 9 out of 10 when sorted by date.
- agilo 15y agoThanks for the tip!
- derrickpetzold 15y agohttp://crowdtube.tv http://crowdtube.tv aggergates reddit and delicious.
- edge17 15y agoMight be interesting to watch this over the next few days - http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast
- mdariani 15y agowhat simulator do they use?
- alanh 15y agoWas that a real-time video (i.e., shot and played at 1x speed)? If so, the matter appears to be traveling at roughly the speed of light. Greater, perhaps, indicating the video was sped up. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=diameter+of+the+Sun+%2F+speed+of+light http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=diameter+of+the+Sun+%2F... Edit… If you look closely (in HD), there are timestamps, suggesting this is being played at ~3600x, or one second of playtime representing an hour in reality.
- sukuriant 15y agoI would have rather seen this video occurring much more slowly. It would have been more .. intense.
- jvdb 15y agoFor nice current images of the Sun, the Proba 2 satellite [1] continuously watches it and dumps some nice imagery/movies. It's ESA sponsored, and both it's sensors (SWAP producing the visuals) are interpreted by the Belgian Royal Observatory. Iirc the Belgians and the Canadians are the only ones keeping a close eye on the sun, counting sun spots and such. Makes for a nice desktop bg also! [1] http://proba2.oma.be/index.html/ http://proba2.oma.be/index.html/
- magicalist 15y agomaybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying, but this event happened today, so it's pretty current. You can also get "the sun right now" at the SDO site[1], and it looks like they update those every 15 minutes. There are also several probes that are keeping a close eye on the sun these days, from the more venerable SOHO to the newer STEREO probes and now SDO, of course. [1] http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/ http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/
- mturmon 15y agoIf you want exquisite solar desktop images, the place to go is: http://www.solarphysics.kva.se/gallery/images/2010/ http://www.solarphysics.kva.se/gallery/images/2010/ These are from the Swedish Vacuum telescope on La Palma (Canary Islands). This instrument currently offers the highest-resolution solar images anywhere. The images shown on that page show many convection cells, called the solar supergranulation. Each cell is about the size of Earth. What you say about who's keeping an eye on the Sun is not the case. In addition to the Swedish telescope above, the Japanese have an excellent high-resolution imager (in orbit) called Hinode, and there are multiple US space imager including SDO and Stereo, plus many terrestrial telescopes.
- strooltz 15y agoso that's why skype crashed this morning... :P
- J3L2404 15y agoUntil about the middle of February it looked as if we were going to maybe catch a break on global warming as the Sun's output was down significantly and the possibility that a Maunder type solar minimum was occurring was increasing. About 2/15/11 solar output started getting back to more normal levels. http://www.wm7d.net/hamradio/solar/index.shtml http://www.wm7d.net/hamradio/solar/index.shtml Too bad, we could use a break.
- necenzurat 15y agothe sun divided by 0
- RobMcCullough 15y agoCall me paranoid, but that just made my stomach drop.
- igrekel 15y agoWhy so? You most likely have lived through larger solar eruptions without knowing it.
- igrekel 15y agoThe shockwave is expected to reach earth around 1 pm EST tomorrow (5pm GMT), auroras are likely to follow after that and they should be visible quite far south. http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/2011/06/08 http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/2011/06/08
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- etruong42 15y agoI thought the title meant that an executive from (the now nonexistent) Sun Microsystems lost his cool.