Look Who it Was Random video

Solar Pulp Fiction: The Royal Vengeance of the Sun

3,337 views · Published 15 November 2015 · 7:14 · Indexed 12 November 2026

Channel: thornews · 2015 · Entertainment

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Holy Smokes! I guess an Old Dog can change its Spots, both Phil Plait AND The White House are now starting to realize that the Sun, Coronal Mass Ejections and Solar Wind can have a very strong effect on our Climate, our Electronics and our Future. 

Thanks to Sage for holding my hand as we stepped into a brighter future for Solar Science. And, I guess, Phil. But he didn't hold my hand. EVER. 

Strange Days, indeed.

God Bless Everyone, 

T

@newTHOR on Twitter

https://www.facebook.com/thornewsgo


http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/11/09/solar_storms_new_evidence_that_the_sun_twice_erupted_violently_in_the_middle.html

"In the years 774 and 993, the Earth was attacked from space.

Not by aliens, but by a natural event—and it was very, very powerful.

Phil Plait writes Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog and is an astronomer, public speaker, science evangelizer, and author of Death From the Skies!  

Whatever it was, it subtly altered the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere, creating trace amounts of radioactive elements like chlorine-36, beryllium-10, and carbon-14. And those provide the clue to what the event was: Those isotopes are created when high-energy protons slam into our air. That means the source must have been from space.

These must have been huge waves of subatomic particles that slammed into us on those dates. Spikes in the abundances of those elements were found all over the world, including ice cores from the Arctic and Antarctic, Chinese corals, and more. Generating that many particles isn’t easy, and only extremely violent events can do it.

Several possible sources have been considered. One candidate is that the Earth got caught in the beam from a gamma-ray burst, the mind-crushingly powerful demise of a very high mass star. I wrote about this being the possible cause of the 774 event in an earlier article. However, GRB impacts don’t usually create 10Be due to the detailed physics of the blast, so that makes a GRB as the source shaky. Plus, they’re very rare events, so having two happen in as many centuries is extremely unlikely (I didn’t know about the 993 event when I wrote that article, or else I would’ve been a lot more likely to wonder about other sources).

New research studying the amounts of these radioactive materials in ice cores points to a different culprit, one I wouldn’t have thought possible: the Sun.

The Sun generates ridiculously strong magnetic fields in its interior, and these can store vast amounts of energy. They can release this energy explosively on the surface, creating intense solar flares. Sometimes the loops of magnetism do this far above the Sun’s surface, creating what are called coronal mass ejections. These are less intense (that is, less concentrated bursts of energy) than flares, but far larger and more powerful; think of flares versus CMEs like solar tornadoes versus hurricanes."

Continued on Slate

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