SUN STORM: Looped solar prominences [bottom right] can break apart and launch billion-ton jets of energy and matter at Earth.
Image: SOHO/EIT (ESA & NASA)
More In This Article
-
The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
Read More »
Though triskaidekaphobes—those who fear the number 13—recoil over today's date (and a Friday the 13th at that), they can take solace knowing that there is only a very low probability that the sun will bombard Earth today like it did on March 13, 1989. Unless, that is, this writing jinxes it (speaking of superstition).
Two decades ago, one of the most extreme examples of space weather in modern times wracked the planet. Space weather comes primarily from the sun, which constantly sends particles and energy Earth's way via the so-called solar wind.
But like conventional terrestrial weather, storms and other disruptions on the sun occur. The sun frequently emits bursts of matter and energy called flares, which are triggered by a star's natural magnetic turbulence. Occasionally, however, the sun also belches a billion-ton plume of superheated plasma (ionized gas), known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). If this massive bubble of plasma and radiation is aimed right at Earth, it can pose a serious threat to satellite operations and even to power grids on the ground, along with modern civilization that depends on their electricity.
Slide Show: Space Weather
On March 10, 1989, a CME about the size of 36 Earths erupted from the sun's roiling surface and ripped through space at a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per hour. Two days later, the torrid gas cloud crashed against Earth's magnetosphere—the magnetic field generated by the planet's spinning molten iron core that helps deflect the solar wind and more potent solar jetsam. This blast from the sun severely disrupted the magnetosphere and set off a geomagnetic superstorm.
As Sten Odenwald, an astrophysicist at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., relates in his book The 23rd Cycle, what ensued was one of the grandest displays of auroras—usually manifested as the aurora borealis (northern lights) or aurora australis (southern lights)—in recent times. Auroras form when Earth's magnetic field funnels highly energetic particles toward the poles where the field emanates. There, the charged particles strike molecules in Earth's atmosphere that release photons of various colors (red hues come from oxygen, for example) and light up polar regions in frequent auroral displays.
But the event of March 13 (the date fell on a Monday that year) was no mere breath of solar wind or a flare that kindled a transient, flickering light show. Undulating, multicolored auroras spread as far south as Texas and Cuba, and a red glow appeared in the night sky over most of the world. Some startled people who had never seen an aurora before even feared that nuclear war had broken out, Odenwald recounts.
Some satellites, the closest to the action, suffered electronic glitches. "That wasn't so much an issue then, as there were far fewer satellites in orbit compared to now," Odenwald says. The space storm's effects extended all the way to Earth's surface and even below it in the form of geomagnetically induced currents (GICs). These electrical surges infiltrated power grids all over North America and northern Europe, and even destroyed a transformer at a nuclear power plant in New Jersey.
Most significantly, at about 2:45 A.M. local time on Monday, March 13, Canada's Hydro-Québec power utility's grid crashed when safety systems sensed a power overload caused by the currents pulsing through the ground. The failure knocked out electricity to six million people in northeastern Canada for as long as nine hours—the biggest outage ever caused by a geomagnetic storm.
Of course, electrical generation for distribution to homes and businesses is not even 130 years old. And far bigger geomagnetic storms have struck in the recent past (in 1859 and 1921, most prominently), and are all but certain to in the future.
See what we're tweeting about
18 Comments
Add CommentFrom the story above:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"...a CME about the size of 36 Earths erupted from the sun's roiling surface and ripped through space at a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per hour. Two days later..."
If the Earth is 91-93 Million miles and the gas travels at 1 million miles per hour - how did it get here in 48 hours?
Can anyone at SciAm add - or proofread?
Well 93/1.6= 58 and 91/1.6=56. 48 +8-10 hours which is less than 3 days would lead one to say loosely about 2 days time. An 8-10 hour differance is not really a huge sticking point on the story.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour math is wrong. Please read carefully.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this93/1.6 is not the proper division. That is dividing miles per hour over kilometers per hour, meaningless in this context.
The distance from the Sun to the Earths magnetosphere is about 93 MILLION miles. Anything that travels at 1 MILLION miles per hour will take 93/1 hours, or 3.875 days (3 and 7/8).
The ratio is the same if we measure in kilometers per hour.
Candide is right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSpeed of 1 million miles per is aprox. right (318 - 485 km/s)
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/610/1/532/18042.web.pdf?request-id=f61cd8e6-debf-4a07-a11e-d34906d359b9
That results in nearly 4 days travel time
You are correct, but aren't you missing the point of the article?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo it should have been 2 million mph, or so. It's not like it's off by an order of magnitude, and they only gave the speed and time figures to one significant digit. 1.54 mph would be fast enough to get it there within 2.5 days. Call it a rounding error. :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyway, I'm with Hoopla.
Make that 1.54M mph. Now there's an error of a few orders of magnitude! ;)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe scary thing is the solar wind now is the lowest and coolest that has ever been measured and the solar sun spot activity is still near "0" and the next solar max should be before end of 2012. Scientific American is a reporter of scientific news not history.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCouldn't we put a giant Solar panel satellite in space waiting for the next flare. Absorbing the solar plasma and turning it into usable energy. Obviously you would need to modify the solar panels but would that be possible?????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA solar panel collects light, a solar flare is ejected matter.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSure, the only point of the article is quibbling over how long it took, right? :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs that Science "..so it shoulda been xxx?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWild a$$ guesses are not science and SciAm should at least have proofreaders. The quality here stinks. I'd expect that of other sites, say celebrity gossip sites but (supposedly) Scientific American is a respected organization.
I find it hard to respect an organization that cannot even do simple math.
See this for another example of quality:
https://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=eruption-threat-increases-for-mount-2009-03-16&posted=1#comments
Look at it this way, if (as the article posits) we can possibly develop some way to alert ourselves of these, it will be VERY IMPORTANT to know how fast they travel and when they will affect us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPreparing after the fact, due to a math error, is closing the barn door after all the cows have left.
"the torrid gas cloud crashed against Earth's magnetosphere..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe should all be dead now. If these flares are so powerful, yet our earth's protective "space shield" protects us from such a blast, why do we even give man made global warming one ounce of consideration?
@ Freshpin:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe should give global warming consideration and should have concern because it is actually happening at increasing rates over past years. The Carbon in the atmosphere can dispopate back down to reasonable levels but that will take time, time that we are running out of not only for ourselves but the generations after us.
.
Here is an interesting read: http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2009-02/big-thaw-0
I really like to read comments to see what others can contribute to the article. Not to read arguments of a cadre of proof readers surfing the web looking for minor miscalculations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDirect Comment to: pgtruspace
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Coronal mass ejection that blasted past Earth, just prior to the last polarity reversal, continued on and blasted a hole in the heliosphere, which allowed galaxy rays of energy into the solar sphere.
But, as the CME left the Suns surface it blasted a hole in the chromospheres magnetic cap, thus releasing some of the chromospheres hot and pressured positive energied proton gas to quickly vent into the lower corona, as opposed to the gradual release normally performed by the hundreds of spicules. But, the CME continued its perpendicular path from the Suns radiative zone after bursting through the ruptured tachocline and on out through one of the revolving convection zone dynamos. As it came to the coronal cell, connected to its one dynamo that had been ruptured, or from a sister dynamo, the CME arced to the energy in that one of 16 coronal cells, which event not only dispersed a large volume of that coronal cells protons, but large areas of proton gas from the lower corona also screamed out through the blasted opening.
Both the mass that had been accumulated as the radiative mass pressed its path through the tachocline, the convection zone, the thin layer of the photosphere, the chromosphere and the lower corona was added to by the proton mass that had been captured in that one coronal cloud that was; before the incident; in the shape of a croissant.
The total of the mass that escaped from the Sun; as the CME incident created its destruction; left the stars tenuous proton gas areas with a greatly depleted proton content in the areas that had been ruptured. Until the released gas is replaced by more content of effluent from more of the fusion reactions occurring in the radiative zone above the core feed stock, then the coronas croissant shaped 16 clouds will not have re-built up enough size to lessen the slits size between each cloud. Until those slits become narrow again, then the temperature in the lower corona will not build up enough to aid the as yet not pressured protons magnetically captured by each croissant shaped coronal cloud, into radiating more thermal energy out to the products inside of the heliosphere, such as you and I.
Without that happening, the great white sheets of, screaming away from the sun, sprays of tenuous gas will not send highly activated protons and their accompanying electron energy our way to present us with the beauty of the northern lights, or to knock out more of our power grids.
All of that is why the El Nino season had been quiet for quite awhile, which means less moisture in our skies as the radiant energy from the Sun was not as hot as should have occurred had that CME not been so violent.
At the same time, the galaxy cosmic rays are still bouncing around and giving us a bit of an off Sun bathing with cosmic energy. The story of what caused the CME in the first place is another story.
The Ancient One
Just wait until we have an encounter with a very active start that gives us a blast of gamma rays. Nothing compared to anything our sun can dish out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this