A solar flare drowned out radio communications on Earth on February 2. The relatively “tiny” sun spot erupted into a moderately sized Class-C coronal mass ejection. The sound of the waves created by the solar flare cloaked radio waves between 28MHz and 21.1 MHz.
The voices going across the impacted radio signals appeared to be “swallowed” by the solar flare, Wired notes. NASA JOVE project radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft noted how interesting the sound was as the wave from the coronal mass ejection (CME) rolled through.
SOLAR WATCH: Monster Sunspot 1654 Aims Our Way – Earthquake Window Opening As Coronal Mass Ejections To Hit Earth On Thursday!
January 15, 2013 – THE SUN – Simulations of a coronal mass ejection (CME) show the impact arrival of such on January 17th. This coincides with Senior Meteorologist Kevin Martin’s window for an earthquake in North America. The Sun is acting up again, with large sunspots moving across the solar disk. The sunspots are powerful enough for x-class solar flares, the most powerful of them all.
|Image: The Weather Space Network.|
While a 10% chance is now given for such a flare, one is already on the way. This should impact on January 17th and Read more…
A major part of the climate change that scientists have documented over the past few decades comes from human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Not all of it, however. Natural climate cycles haven’t magically disappeared — the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, for example, is entering a phase that will likely boost global temperatures temporarily — and scientists are still discovering new ones.
The latest comes in a new report published in Geophysical Research Letters. It’s well known that the Sun varies slightly in brightness every 11 years, and while those changes pale beside the effect of human-generated greenhouse gases, according to the report, they’re enough to trigger unusually cold winters in Central Europe.
The smoking gun is the freezing of the Rhine river, something that doesn’t happen often because it’s difficult to freeze such a large, free-flowing volume of water. Those unusually cold winters might come along at random, but by looking back at records dating to all the way back to 1780, a Read more…
|French skywatcher Jean-Pierre Brahic took this photo of the violent solar flare from the sunspot 1302 on the sun’s surface on Sept. 22, 2011. Earth is superimposed for scale.
CREDIT: Jean-Pierre Brahic
An intrepid skywatcher has snapped an amazing photograph of a massive solar flare erupting from Sunspot 1302 is one of the most active sunspot groups in years.
A sunspot is a blemish on the sun caused by intense magnetic activity. The new photo, captured on Sept. 22 by skywatcher Jean-Pierre Brahic, shows solar plasma magnetically hanging above the sun’s surface after the Sunspot 1302 unleashed an X-class solar flare. The image includes an inset of Earth for a size comparison.
A big new sunspot is emerging over the sun’s northeastern limb. AR1271 has at least four dark cores and it is crackling with small flares. The sunspot’s entrance was captured in this 24-hour movie from the Solar Dynamics Observatory:
NOAA forecasters estimate a 60% chance of M-class solar flares during the next 24 hours. Because of its location near the sun’s limb, AR1271 does not yet pose a threat for Earth-directed eruptions. This could change in the days ahead, however, as the sunspot turns to face our planet. Readers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor developments.
Apparently previous studies of the sun-climate connection looked at the equatorial polar magnetic field which produces sun spots, but they did not consider the polar magnetic component of the solar dynamo. The polar fields are less strong than the equatorial fields, but it is claimed that the total magnetic fluxes of both fields are comparable. With proxy data they derive an empirical relation between tropospherical temperatures and solar equatorial and polar magnetic fields. The polar field could contribute about Read more…