De Zon ... Vriend of Vijand ?

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Op dinsdag 13 maart 2012 08:48 schreef Zweeffie het volgende:
http://www.earthwatcher.n(...)nsel-bij-de-zon.html

LOOKS LIKE HUGE SPHERE SUCKING PLASMA FROM SUN (HD-Version)

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Solar Flare: What If Biggest Known Sun Storm Hit Today?

Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News
Updated March 8, 2012

A powerful sun storm—associated with the second biggest solar flare of the current 11-year sun cycle—is now hitting Earth, so far with few consequences. But the potentially "severe geomagnetic storm," in NASA's words, could disrupt power grids, radio communications, and GPS as well as spark dazzling auroras.

The storm expected Thursday, though, won't hold a candle to an 1859 space-weather event, scientists say—and it's a good thing too.

If a similar sun storm were to occur in the current day—as it well could—modern life could come to a standstill, they add.

As solar storms go, the two March 6 solar flares associated with Thursday's geomagnetic storm around Earth may not compare to the flares behind the 1859 storm. But, since the sun hasn't yet reached peak activity for this solar cycle, this week's outburst may be only a taste of flares to come.

"The sun has an activity cycle, much like hurricane season," Tom Bogdan, director of the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, said \at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. in 2011.

After "hibernating for four or five years, not doing much of anything," the sun began waking up about a year ago. Even though the upcoming solar maximum may see a record low in the overall amount of activity, the individual events could be very powerful, Bogdan added.

In fact, the biggest solar storm on record—the 1859 blast—happened during a solar maximum about the same size as the one we're entering, according to NASA.

That storm has been dubbed the Carrington Event, after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed the megaflare and was the first to realize the link between activity on the sun and geomagnetic disturbances on Earth.

During the Carrington Event, northern lights were reported as far south as Cuba and Honolulu, while southern lights were seen as far north as Santiago, Chile. (See pictures of auroras generated by the Valentine's Day solar flare.)

The flares were so powerful that "people in the northeastern U.S. could read newspaper print just from the light of the aurora," Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said at a geophysics meeting in December 2010.

In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.

In 1859, such reports were mostly curiosities. But if something similar happened today, the world's high-tech infrastructure could grind to a halt.

"What's at stake," the Space Weather Prediction Center's Bogdan said, "are the advanced technologies that underlie virtually every aspect of our lives."

Solar Flare Would Rupture Earth's "Cyber Cocoon"

To begin with, the University of Colorado's Baker said, electrical disturbances as strong as those that took down telegraph machines—"the Internet of the era"—would be far more disruptive. (See "The Sun: Living With a Stormy Star" in National Geographic magazine.)

Solar storms aimed at Earth come in three stages, not all of which occur in any given storm.

First, high-energy sunlight, mostly x-rays and ultraviolet light, ionizes Earth's upper atmosphere, interfering with radio communications. Next comes a radiation storm, potentially dangerous to unprotected astronauts.

Finally comes a coronal mass ejection, or CME, a slower moving cloud of charged particles that can take several days to reach Earth's atmosphere. When a CME hits, the solar particles can interact with Earth's magnetic field to produce powerful electromagnetic fluctuations. (Related: "Magnetic-Shield Cracks Found; Big Solar Storms Expected.")

"We live in a cyber cocoon enveloping the Earth," Baker said. "Imagine what the consequences might be."

Of particular concern are disruptions to global positioning systems (GPS), which have become ubiquitous in cell phones, airplanes, and automobiles, Baker said. A $13 billion business in 2003, the GPS industry is predicted to grow to nearly $1 trillion by 2017.

In addition, Baker said, satellite communications—also essential to many daily activities—would be at risk from solar storms.

"Every time you purchase a gallon of gas with your credit card, that's a satellite transaction," he said.

But the big fear is what might happen to the electrical grid, since power surges caused by solar particles could blow out giant transformers. Such transformers can take a long time to replace, especially if hundreds are destroyed at once, said Baker, who is a co-author of a National Research Council report on solar-storm risks.

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory's Cliver agrees: "They don't have a lot of these on the shelf," he said.

The eastern half of the U.S. is particularly vulnerable, because the power infrastructure is highly interconnected, so failures could easily cascade like chains of dominoes.

"Imagine large cities without power for a week, a month, or a year," Baker said. "The losses could be $1 to $2 trillion, and the effects could be felt for years."

Even if the latest solar maximum doesn't bring a Carrington-level event, smaller storms have been known to affect power and communications.

The "Halloween storms" of 2003, for instance, interfered with satellite communications, produced a brief power outage in Sweden, and lighted up the skies with ghostly auroras as far south as Florida and Texas.

Buffing Up Space-Weather Predictions

One solution is to rebuild the aging power grid to be less vulnerable to solar disruptions. (See "As Sun Storms Ramp Up, Electric Grid Braces for Impact.")

Another answer is better forecasting.

Scientists using NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft are hoping to get a better understanding of how the sun behaves as it moves deeper into its next maximum and begins generating bigger storms. (See some of SDO's first sun pictures.)

These studies may help scientists predict when and where solar flares might appear and whether a given storm is pointed at Earth.

"Improved predictions will provide more accurate forecasts, so [officials] can take mitigating actions," said Rodney Viereck, a physicist at the Space Weather Prediction Center.

Even now, the center's Bogdan said, the most damaging emissions from big storms travel slowly enough to be detected by sun-watching satellites well before the particles strike Earth. "That gives us [about] 20 hours to determine what actions we need to take," Viereck said.

In a pinch, power companies could protect valuable transformers by taking them offline before the storm strikes. That would produce local blackouts, but they wouldn't last for long.

"The good news is that these storms tend to pass after a couple of hours," Bogdan added.

Meanwhile, scientists are scrambling to learn everything they can about the sun in an effort to produce even longer-range forecasts.

According to Vierick, space-weather predictions have some catching up to do: "We're back where weather forecasters were 50 years ago."

http://news.nationalgeogr(...)3_news_flare20120308

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13/3/12 Solar Eruption Mistaken for Refueling UFO Spaceship

Telescope images captured of the sun on Monday (March 12) show what appears to be a planet-size shadowy object tethered to the sun by a dark filament. In the image sequence, a burst of brightly lit material can be seen erupting from the sun's surface surrounding the dark object, after which the orb detaches from the sun and shoots out into space.

The footage, a composite of images captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and processed by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, has quickly garnered attention on YouTube, where viewers are suggesting it shows a UFO spacecraft refueling by sucking up solar plasma, or at the very least, the birth of a new planet.

However, according to NASA scientists, the feature is actually a little-understood, but frequently observed, type of solar activity called a "prominence," and the way it is situated beneath another solar feature gives it its otherworldy appearance

SOMETHING SHOOTING OFF OF THE SUN (SLOW)JHV_movie_created_2012-03-12_04.05.13.mp4

The thread extending from the lower left edge of the sun in the video is known as a "prominence," a feature containing cooler, denser plasma than the surrounding 3.5-million-degree Fahrenheit corona, said Joseph Gurman, project scientist in the Solar Physics Laboratory at NASA Goddard. It isn't yet known exactly how prominences develop, but these dense plasma loops can extend from the sun's surface thousands of miles into space.

"When prominences are that extended in height above the limb [edge of the sun], it's usually a sign that they're about to erupt, as this one did," Gurman told Life's Little Mysteries.

C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who runs a website called The Sun Today, explained that the prominence is situated below a tunnel-shape feature called a filament channel. "When you look at it from the edge of the sun, what you actually see is a spherical object. You're actually looking down the tunnel. And this tunnel sits up top of the filament," Young explained at The Sun Today. He added that the development of these structures is quite common.

But why is the prominence dark? Gurman explained that all the light in the SDO images is the same color — a specific wavelength that is emitted by iron atoms that have been ionized 13 times, known as Fe XIV. The dark filament seen in the images (the refueling UFO's "tether," according to YouTube users) is a part of the prominence that happens to absorb light of this color, making it appear dark. "The absorption is typically seen in lines such as Fe XIV only in the thinnest, densest parts of the prominence, which is here seen edge-on as it rotates over the solar limb," he said. [6 Everyday Things That Work Strangely in Space]

In the image sequence, there is a burst of activity around the prominence, and then it and the filament channel shoot out into space immediately afterwards. According to Gurman, the first event was probably an outburst of the sun's magnetic field called a coronal mass ejection. "It's generally accepted, though still not conclusively proven, that prominence eruptions occur when the overlying magnetic field that contains the prominence material is disrupted," he said.

Another image showing the same coronal mass ejection and prominence eruption was captured by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory on Monday. In this image, which captured light in the visible wavelength range, a bright swirl of material from the prominence trails the fainter edge of the coronal mass ejection as the two plunge into space.

Less exciting than a refueling UFO or a brand new planet, maybe — but there's nothing quite like the truth.

http://www.space.com/14894-refueling-ufo-solar-prominence.html