The sun is celebrating a late Independence Day.
The sun is celebrating a late Independence Day.
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» The sun is celebrating a late Independence Day.
Summary:
Dark 'fireworks' on the sun
It scares me when they said "We'd never seen anything like it."
"Half of the sun appeared to be blowing itself to bits."
What is this mean anyway?
Before you freak out, you have to realize that we really haven't been watching the sun for very long, cosmically speaking anyway. Towards the end of the article he admits that it's very possible that this is actually a common thing. Also, it was just an m-class flare which is nothing to worry about. It's just neat.
It scares me when they said "We'd never seen anything like it."
Oh, fer cryin' out loud. SDO didn't launch until February 2010, so we've only had the ability to see things like this for about a year and a half. And in early 2010, the Sun was still pretty quiet.
Cosmophobia strikes again. People would do well to remember that in science, new discoveries are made all the time. Rather than gulp at the prospect of "we've never seen this before", just realise that these discoveries enhance our understanding of things like the sun, and that's a good thing.
The great thing about science is, it's true whether you believe in it or not.
Hey I actually wanted to apologize. Somehow I glossed over the date of the article when I read it. This is the same flare from June 7th. Sorry guys!
I was looking at the below text quoted from the article at NASA. I was wondering about the mass comparison where they say it would take 100 CMEs if that size to make a "decent size comet". I remember reading the comparisons here a while back and it seemed they were less massive than that. Just wondering opinions on this.
Containing some 1015 grams of matter, coronal mass ejections aren't as massive as they sound. It would take a hundred of the June 7th CMEs to make a decent-sized comet; e.g., the nucleus of Halley's Comet masses about 2 x 1017 gm. "Remember that this is just a magnetized cloud of gas leaving from the quite tenuous corona," notes Vourlidas. "The cloud is big, but really not very massive compared to things like comets, moons, and planets."
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/11jul_darkfireworks/
“In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.” - Oscar Wilde
Not much opinion on it, just good to hear the comparison. It won't change anything for PG, but at least it helps people like you and I :)
Take it a step further. If I've got my maths right, if it takes 100 June 7th CMEs to make Halley's Comet, it would take nearly 27 billion Halley's Comets to match the mass of the Earth (so 2 and half trillion CMEs, at these incredibly rough back of the envelope figures).
Which means if the sun threw off a CME the same mass as the Earth every 11,500 years then it would only be able to throw about 335 thousand before it throws out it's entire mass. Unfortunately, the sun is about 4 billion years old which means if this were possible, it would have thrown about 350 thousand of these CME's already. And thats just for CME's the mass of the Earth, where it would take much more to do what PG is claiming. Looks like our sun doesn't actually exist.
/forum/t-371669/the-sun-is-celebrating-a-late-independence-day#post-