The New Solar Thread

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ZoWie
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The New Solar Thread

Post by ZoWie »

It's time.
AR 3256 produced an X1.2 solar flare at 02:33 UTC early this morning (Mar 29). Coronagraph imagery shows a small coronal mass ejection (CME) leaving the blast site, but so far appears to be off the Sun-Earth line. Other than the brief radio blackout during the flare itself, no major impacts should be expected.
https://www.solarham.net/

We have now had more of the major X-class solar flares in three months than in the past several years combined. Well more, in fact. Solar peak is here, and this is going to be a big one. Navigation has been disrupted at least once and more likely twice in the past month or so.

The daily notch shown on the NOAA chart is due to the equinox, and some kind of blockage in the data stream for X-ray solar emission which occurs around these two parts of the year. It's not the apocalypse, just bad data. Today's notch blocked part of the data for the usual type of slow decline in emission that we would expect after a major flare.

Various forms of glow in the sky can be expected, though for most you'll have to have a clear night in a relatively unpopulated area to see them. It's not just the aurora. In the past decade or so, much has been written on a number of other moving-charge phenomena that cause glowing in the sky. Off the top of my head, I can think of the equatorial ring current, red sprites (caused by thunderstorms), blue jets (ditto), and a couple more with strange names and stranger causes.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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In addition to flares, there are always coronal holes. They don't follow a cycle. They're magnetic gaps through which plasma is free to flow, and if it reaches Earth, a big if, the effects are similar to those of mass ejections caused by explosive flares.

A fairly small one coughed right at the Earth. It's always a tricky call because the path from the sun is curved and both bodies are moving. However, enhanced aurora is possible in the usual places starting tomorrow and lasting a couple of days. Considering the time of year, in which aurora was seen in Florida last week, there's a small chance of some surprises.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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You don't always see what's happening on the sun. Sunspot activity is down from the late winter outburst, but unless you look at just the right color of light, you don't see the various other phenomena. Right now there are a number of filaments of slightly cooler (but still hotter than hell) plasma above the solar surface, such as it is, and one of these blew off into space and one end of the resulting mass ejection just hit the Earth.

Kp has gone from quiet to right below the storm threshold in a couple of hours. Geomagnetic field instantly turned sharply south. People in places like Alberta might get some aurora out of this.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Copy of answer to post on the EARTH thread:

Funny you should bring that up today. There was a predicted CME arrival from one of the filaments I mentioned, that was supposed to increase geomagnetic activity to the lower end of the storm scale.

It hit right on schedule, and many times stronger than expected. Kp went briefly to 8 a few hours ago, and now it's down to 7.5.

Kp=8 is the highest for this solar cycle, and 9 is as high as it can go.

It's a historic magnetic storm.

Were it nearer the equinox I'd be looking at the Mt. Wilson webcam to see if there's aurora in LA. It's above the temperature inversion, and it's a cloudy day so presumably it would hold down the city light and we'd have a shot at aurora in LA.

Were there to be aurora in LA, it would be the first time since an X15/extra bright flare knocked out power in Canada and caused aurora all the way down to Mexico.

Except there has been no flare above class M in at least a week. It's not a flare, and filament eruptions are a tiny fraction of an X class flare in their energy and mass output.

Radio propagation over the poles is completely shut down by particle flow rendering the ionosphere opaque. In lower latitudes, I would expect that VHF would have the kind of skip propagation that is usually encountered on HF.

Completely unexpected. We expected a ripple and got a tsunami. Go figure.

Here's why I get excited in solar peaks. They rarely follow the rules as we know them at all, then we learn.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Yes, there was aurora in LA last night, but you had to be out in the desert to see it. Mt. Wilson had a dim glow off in the distance, but farther east it was clear and the usual red color since that's all one sees this far south.

That happens about once per cycle, if you're lucky. I wonder... is this cycle really peaking early the way one theory says it will? Still, you can't link it to a flare this time, and that's really really rare. More solar-terrestrial research papers will be published soon, I'm sure.

You didn't want to be flying on the polar route last night. Probably got cancelled. These polar cap events take out anything relying on photons moving through the atmosphere, which includes GPS. No navigation in the Arctic, AT ALL. They cancel flights.

Even birds have trouble. (They navigate by Earth's magnetic field, believe it or not.) Sometimes they get lost.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Things have been rather dull this week, but this is likely to change around Sunday. There have been a few M-class flares, and this morning a big filament eruption touched off a string of CME events across the visible solar disk. Some of this cosmic detritus is likely to reach Earth and set off geomagnetic events of unknown strength, though nothing compared to the recent severe storm. It depends on the speed of the CMEs and whether or not they merge and get stronger.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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M-class flares are currently pretty much continuous, producing an X-ray curve that looks more like a saw blade. The two regions that are responsible are extremely active, and the solar rotation is making them more geoeffective. X class flares, the big ones, are increasingly possible.

Expect an ionospheric disturbance several times a day. Most will be completely inconsequential unless you are using a radio on one of the lower short wave bands.

All this has of course really jazzed up all the various electrical and magnetic fields that circulate around this planet. Some of these are worth noticing if you are an astronaut in space, but you're not, so they're of no consequence either. They're pretty interesting, though, with Van Allen belts, equatorial ring currents, proton and electron flux, and other such fun with physics. All manner of mass and energy flying around the planet.

Don't be surprised if you start hearing tinfoil-y speculation on the nooz. Some people get really worked up about this stuff, for no reason. I'll tell you if there's a problem, provided there's still a functioning Internet to get on.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Martin Mlynczak of NASA's Langley Science Center has been reported in various places as saying that data from satellite measurements indicates that this year's solar activity has indeed heated the Earth's upper atmosphere to its highest temperature in 20 years.

There is no link that can be found in NASA's convoluted site, though Mlynczak's resume is there and it indicates that he knows his stuff. Given that this happens every cycle, I see no reason to doubt it.

The previous cycle was so weak that we exceeded its high several months ago, so you can't go by any of its data. This time is different. With our reliance on space-based communications and navigation, and the total disregard of all other systems due to commercial constraints, we're setting ourselves up for a bad situation, or at least a fairly disruptive and very expensive one.

SpaceX, as we know, has been orbiting thousands of satellites for its Internet service provider. These have disrupted Earth-based astronomy and been a general pain in the ass, but as we know money talks and everything else walks. SpaceX has indeed been launching to a higher orbit because they have experienced early re-entry caused by greater drag from the rising atmosphere.

There's a double whammy of increased drag on LEO satellites, and shorter service life due to radiation and arcing from increased magnetic storming and more moving charges in the Earth's magnetic field.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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New active solar region #3327 doesn't look like much, but it's already produced a dandy M4.7 flare. Earlier this morning, it undoubtedly provided another "interesting time" on the radio bands in illuminated portions of the Earth.

Mr. Carrington's flare was exponentially larger than that, but evidence continues to come in that in fact Carrington Events are not a one-off but more common than we thought. His just happened to get everything right, when several CMEs from an unusually but not historically large sunspot region added in phase and greatly increased particle energy. All they had in the 1850s was wire telegraph, but that got blown all to shit worldwide.

There are pictures. They had recently invented photography. The cameras were huge, and the exposures were minutes long, but you got perfectly decent photos then too.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Kind of related. Venus is very bright and visible at night in the western sky.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Same sun. Venus is reflected light.

Venus is fun to watch. It can get really bright. It has phases, like the moon. It's always worth a peek, if the smoke (east) or deep cloud cover (west) clears in time to see it.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Solar activity is currently considered to be low, but that's relative. The resting level right now is higher than the peaks were at the cycle's low point. We have a solar flux in the 140s, while a few years back it rarely got above 80.

The other side of the sun, which we don't see right now but will in a couple of weeks, seems a lot more active. We can't see it but they have a clever way of mapping it by measuring seismic waves propagated through the whole sun. Let's just say that they make LA earthquakes look pretty weenie.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Here comes the sun, and I say "Zowie, it's allright..." :lol: :lol: :lol:

I do loves me some sun science! I watch a lot of docs on YouTube.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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I go to sleep with solar activity at a low point and geomagnetic activity next to zero, with predictions for more of the same thing.

I wake up in the middle of a perfectly decent solar-terrestrial event. We've had Kp indices at and above the storm threshold and aurora in places like Montana. It's been going on since about midnight Pacific time. Activity has recently declined from G2 level magnetic storming but only down to a low G1, essentially an unsettled condition.

Nothing to do with solar flares, which have been just barely into the moderate range. Seems to be just a bunch of mild space weather events lining up and adding in phase with a fluctuation in the Earth's magnetic field to make a fairly large result.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Active region 3335 just blew a fair/middling solar flare right at the Earth. The X-ray and EUV were just enough to cause a minor radio blackout on paths over the Atlantic Ocean. Would have been at just the right time to disrupt the high-frequency trading on the US exchanges by brokerages in UK and Germany, but the markets are closed on Sunday.

Possible weak magnetic storming after the usual couple of days for the ejected massive particles to get here.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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X-class flare about a half hour ago, caused a radio blackout on this coast, now in the slow decay phase. It's in region 3341, not in a position to cause any major disturbance later in the week.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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We have our first really big sunspot group of Cycle 25. It's active region #3354, and it's a MoFo. It's clearly visible on the sun without a telescope, using proper projection or filtering techniques so you don't go blind. It looks a great deal like Mr. Carrington's monster that zapped the earth and named the phenomenon in the 19th century, though it's a fraction of the size. It has the same dragonlike projections wrapping around and threatening to meet and blow up. It's growing daily, and in a perfect position for any possible major explosions to ruin your day. So far, though, it's been unexpectedly quiet.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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ZoWie wrote: Thu Jun 29, 2023 11:47 am We have our first really big sunspot group of Cycle 25. It's active region #3354, and it's a MoFo. It's clearly visible on the sun without a telescope, using proper projection or filtering techniques so you don't go blind. It looks a great deal like Mr. Carrington's monster that zapped the earth and named the phenomenon in the 19th century, though it's a fraction of the size. It has the same dragonlike projections wrapping around and threatening to meet and blow up. It's growing daily, and in a perfect position for any possible major explosions to ruin your day. So far, though, it's been unexpectedly quiet.
Jesus. This is the thing that could turn the human race into violent chaos.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Libertas wrote: Thu Jun 29, 2023 2:12 pm Jesus. This is the thing that could turn the human race into violent chaos.
Yes, but this is not the sunspot group to do it. It'll be out of position in a couple of days, and we don't have any CMEs in transit for the high-energy discharge to catch up with and reinforce, even if there was a high-energy discharge which so far there isn't.

This said, we are indeed courting disaster if we don't come up with a credible backup system to GPS. Any Carrington Event scale disruption would completely wipe it out, and it would take many years and billions of dollars to replace it. The military has some partial alternatives, and aircraft haven't gotten rid of the old terrestrial navaids, or at least some of them haven't. Even so, far as civil society is concerned, its sudden loss would bring the world to an indefinite halt.

The big science news for today concerns gravity waves. We already know they exist but someone with a good publicity department has some new and very interesting results which are being reported all over the Nooz.
Last edited by ZoWie on Thu Jun 29, 2023 3:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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ZoWie wrote: Thu Jun 29, 2023 3:32 pm Yes, but this is not the sunspot group to do it. It'll be out of position in a couple of days, and we don't have any CMEs in transit for the high-energy discharge to catch up with and reinforce, even if there was a high-energy discharge which so far there isn't.

This said, we are indeed courting disaster if we don't come up with a credible backup system to GPS. Any Carrington Event scale disruption would completely wipe it out, and it would take many years and billions of dollars to replace it. The military has some partial alternatives, and aircraft haven't gotten rid of the old terrestrial navaids, or at least some of them haven't. Even so, far as civil society is concerned, its sudden loss would bring the world to an indefinite halt.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Dunno, think of the jobs it would create to fund a reliable terrestrial backup for GPS and the similarly space-based Russian GLONASS which would suffer a similar fate. Since a world without GPS is not a functioning world, the need is there, all we have to do is commit to something for once.

It would require a massive undertaking involving a whole physical infrastructure worldwide, and a lot of good paying skilled union jobs. Best of all, it's best that we get on with it sooner, not later. Yesterday would have been nice. That and climate can create a whole lot of work, and prevent global scale economic disasters and the kind of violence you're afraid of. It could be the next economic miracle.

Let's get to it.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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OK with me, tell me what to do.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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There's nothing you can do. There's nothing I can do. There is only ranting on the Internet.

I'm right, though.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

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Really, really nice mass ejection at 2055 UTC from a sunspot group we can't see, on the far side of the sun. Real winner. Big as all hell.

Effect on the Earth should be zero.
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Re: The New Solar Thread

Post by Libertas »

ZoWie wrote: Thu Jun 29, 2023 4:15 pm Really, really nice mass ejection at 2055 UTC from a sunspot group we can't see, on the far side of the sun. Real winner. Big as all hell.

Effect on the Earth should be zero.
Where are you seeing this info? link?
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