Wednesday's Web Thievery: Solar Flares & SunScreen Creme

Get ready for brace position! Impact imminent. Break out the SPF 1000 Sunscreen.

The largest solar flare event in many years occurred yesterday at 7pm NZ standard time and is heading our way.

The next couple of days are going to be very interesting indeed, especially if your business (or life that matter) revolves around electricity, global communication, computers and the internet anyway.
This also means those planning an international flight may want to take a raincheck on that if their flight is heading anywhere near the poles as satelitte communication, and possibly electrical systems in general, are likely to be affected by a significant electromagnetic storm the likes of which we have not seen in quite a while.

It is these kinds of events that NASA warned us about a couple of years ago, leading up to a solar maximum peak that had the potential to create 10 times the economic damage on the US as Katrina, and take decades to rebuild fried electrical infrastructure.

Ah the pretty lights in the sky! Expect some quite beautiful pictures of the auroras over the coming 24-36 hours.

As the sun wakes up from a very quiet solar minimum cycle and makes its way into what has been predicted to be the most active solar maximum cycle in generations, the solar "events" are certainly coming thick and fast this week.
What does all of this mean for the humans?
Quite a lot really, in fact the implications of this solar maximum cycle are very definitely being "played down" officially. However if you scratch the surface of this story just a little, the official statements are very worrying indeed, and filled with alarming sentences and phrases one would imagine mainstream media would just lap up. They are not doing this, instead choosing a less alarming "look how pretty this is" approach, sprinkled with "aren't the scientists clever with all their gadgets to produce these pretty pictures" rather than getting into the hard discussions of what these pictures mean, especially as we head into the peak of the cycle at the end of next year.
You got it, December 2012. Cue the doomsday music and vitriolic comments.

There are plenty of accessible information streams to monitor what is going on the sun and the current cycle of solar storms, what is a little harder to understand is what impact this will have on our little planet. We have written a few articles about this already which will appear in the related articles menu after the read more.

Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at the United States National Weather Service's Space Weather Prediction Center said the event is "expected to cause G1 (minor) to G2 (moderate) levels of geomagnetic storm activity tomorrow, June 8, beginning around 1800 GMT." (that is around 6am June 9th NZ Time) The resulting geomagnetic storm could cause some disruption in power grids, satellites that operate global positioning systems and other devices, and may lead to some rerouting of flights over the polar regions, Murtagh said.
Coronagraphs on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) are still monitoring the CME as it billows away from the sun toward the Earth.

Although the blast was not squarely Earth-directed, it will affect our planet. The CME should deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field during the late hours of June 8th or June 9th (GMT - +12 hrs for NZ standard time). For those at the top and bottom of the planet we can expect some spectacular auroras when the CME arrives.

Below is a video with commentary from solar physicist C. Alex Young of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center capturing images of the solar flare event, and material splashing back to the stellar surface. "I've never seen material released this way before," he says in the video. "It looks like someone kicked a clod of dirt in the air--an amazing, amazing event."

The Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) event that has occurred is very significant within the conversation regarding our modern way of life. NASA has previously voiced it's concern over the impact these solar storms are going to have on the heavily technology reliant parts of the world. See the article in the related articles menu about this and take the time to go to the links listed to educate yourself more on the official NASA position. It makes for sobering reading, especially now as some of those reports were written ten years ago and are under assessing the actual activity now being recorded.

The video footage available for anyone to use is astounding, and freely accessible at the website < http://www.helioviewer.org/ >(copy & paste it people). You can search for events by time and date stamp.

Helioviewer.org is an open-source project for the visualization of solar and heliospheric data. The project is funded by ESA and NASA.

The youtube user I follow put this in the desription of the video:

http://www.thesuntoday.org - I woke up to this event, aptly described in an email from a colleague - "Never seen anything like this before - spectacular". It really is just amazing! Here are videos of a prominence eruption from 304, 171 and 211 Angstrom channel cameras on SDO. Also included is a video from the LASCO C2 coronagraph aboard the SOHO spacecraft. This event produced M2.5 x-ray solar flare and a moderate proton storm.

Here is another view of the CMA that shows the real size of the blast we are now facing over the coming days.

Over the past few days, amateur astronomers have recorded some of the most photogenic solar activity in years. Onlookers describe huge prominences of magnetized plasma rising above the stellar surface as "Unbelievable!" - "Hydrogen at its best" - "Massive and incredible!"
This shot was simply hair-raising (click to enlarge):

Yikes!
Break out that industrial strength sunscreen, the tin foil hat and unplug precious electronics and hard drives from the wall.