Sunspot group 1158 produces an X class solar flare

[ScienceRocks]

Sunspot group 1158 produces an X class solar flare
Posted on February 14, 2011 by Anthony Watts

It’s the first one in 38 months, Solar expert Dr. Leif Svalgaard says the last X class flare was Dec 13th, 2006. The flare today is the first Solar Cycle 24 flare reaching X class level.

BOOOM!!!!

SOLARCYCLE 24.com / Solar Cycle 24 / Spaceweather / Amateur Radio VHF Aurora Website

Major Flare (X2.2) / Full Halo CME
02/15/2011 by Kevin VE3EN at 02:20
Comment on Message Board

UPDATE - It appears a full halo CME was associated with the X2.2 Flare. I created this Movie with the STEREO website using the COR2 Behind data.

X2.2 Major Solar Flare - The sun showed some love on Valentines Day. Massive Sunspot 1158 has produced a major X2.2 Class Solar Flare at 01:56 UTC Tuesday. This is the largest Solar Flare of Cycle 24 and a CME could be associated with this event. A strong R3 Radio Blackout has taken place as well. More to follow.


Solar Flux 113 - The solar flux is again at a new high of 113. This beats out Sunday's reading of 107 and this is the highest it has been since September of 2005.


2011 02 05 81 26 25 0 -999 A4.4 0 0 0 5 0 0 0
2011 02 06 80 41 30 0 -999 A4.4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2011 02 07 82 28 30 0 -999 A5.6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2011 02 08 90 71 120 4 -999 B1.0 2 0 0 3 0 0 0
2011 02 09 89 67 230 0 -999 B1.4 1 1 0 1 0 0 0
2011 02 10 91 38 40 0 -999 B2.3 4 0 0 0 0 0 0
2011 02 11 91 54 100 2 -999 B1.6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2011 02 12 96 63 90 1 -999 B1.2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
2011 02 13 107 84 180 0 -999 B4.4 4 1 0 3 1 0 0
2011 02 14 113 90 530 1 -999 * 11 1 0 6 1 0 0


About ******* time....WAHOOOOOO!!!! Come on sun get us to 200!!!!

 

[Old Rocks]

Hmmm..... The sun resumes normal sunspot activity, we get a strong El Nino, and the TSI goes up instead of down, while both CO2 and CH4 are increasing, could be interesting in the coming decade.

 

[waltky]

Granny hopes it zaps `em lefty lib'rals onna butt...

Solar flare 2011: How a dazzling display can wreak electrical havoc
February 17, 2011 - Solar flare 2011: A massive eruption of charged solar plasma glanced off the earth this week, a reminder that our star can still surprise us.

As we were reminded this week, the sun is no placid sphere that uniformly radiates warmth. On the contrary, our star roils, churns, belches, and, every now and then – just to remind us who really runs things in this solar system – spits fire in our direction. Just before 9 p.m. EST on Valentine's Day, a tremendous explosion on the sun's surface unleashed a wave of charged plasma that hurtled toward our planet at more than two million miles per hour.

The solar flare and its attendant torrent of solar wind – the biggest of its kind in four years – glanced off of the Earth's North Pole, warping the electric currents in our upper atmosphere and blacking out shortwave radio transmissions in southern China. It could have been much worse. In March 1989, a blast of solar wind tripped circuit breakers on Hydro-Québec's power grid, leaving six million people without electricity for nine hours. Later that year, another solar eruption caused computer crashes that brought trading on Toronto's stock market to a halt.

And 1989 was a mere ripple compared to the solar tsunami of 1859, which saw the biggest disruption of the earth's magnetic field in recorded history. In September of that year, the sun threw a massive cloud of charged plasma our way, lighting up the night sky with auroras as far south as Havana. Telegraph wires shorted out, igniting papers and shocking telegraph operators.

MORE

See also:

What hibernating bears can tell us about space travel
February 17, 2011 - Scientists studying hibernation discovered that bears' super-slow metabolism may provide clues for treating trauma patients and preparing for spaceflight.

Scientists have taken an unprecedented look at the biological changes bears undergo when they bed down for winter, and the results have been little short of stunning, researchers say. From an unexpectedly dramatic slowdown in the chemical processes that keep the bears alive to their rafter-rattling snores, ursine metabolic tricks may suggest more-effective ways of stabilizing trauma patients as they await hospital treatment, the researchers involved say. In addition, the project's results could contribute to new approaches for helping astronauts counter the physical changes they experience during long missions in space, the scientists add.

The study, which appears in this week's issue of the journal Science, shows that during the five to seven months black bears hibernate, their heartbeats slowed to as few as nine beats per minute, often with pauses that last up to 20 seconds. The chemical processes that keep them alive slow to only 25 percent of their summertime, most-active levels. Studies of other, smaller hibernating creatures, such as arctic ground squirrels, suggested that a hibernating animal's metabolism rate falls by 50 percent for every 10-degree drop in body temperature. But the bears' body temperatures dropped only 5 or 6 degrees, while their metabolism plunged 75 percent. And as other studies on hibernating bears had shown, the animals did not lose significant amounts of bone or muscle mass for their seven months of inactivity.

It's the bears' ability to radically slow their life-support system while maintaining muscle and bone mass that make the results so intriguing for human purposes, suggests Brian Barnes, a scientist at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska and the senior scientist on the project. "Somehow they've tricked their tissues – their bones and muscle – into thinking that they are still doing work," he says. By discovering the biochemical signals that perform that trick, he continues, it might be possible to chemically reproduce the same feat in humans.

MORE

 

[Mini 14]

Hmmm..... The sun resumes normal sunspot activity, we get a strong El Nino, and the TSI goes up instead of down, while both CO2 and CH4 are increasing, could be interesting in the coming decade.

Al Gore is going to tell us that the CO2 and CH4 cause solar flares.

 

[Dot Com]

​

 

[Chris]

Hmmm..... The sun resumes normal sunspot activity, we get a strong El Nino, and the TSI goes up instead of down, while both CO2 and CH4 are increasing, could be interesting in the coming decade.

It's going to be hotter, and the Republicans from the oil patch will continue to deny it.

And at some point, the North Polar ice cap will completely melt.

 

[waltky]

Granny says dat's why it's so hot `round here...

Four colossal Sun flares in 48 hours
15 May 2013 - The Sun has unleashed four colossal bursts of radiation in 48 hours.

On Tuesday, it released the biggest solar flare of 2013 so far, an intense burst associated with a huge eruption of particles. When these eruptions reach Earth, they can interfere with satellites and communications systems on the ground. The sunspots that spawned these flares are not directly facing our planet, but some Nasa spacecraft could be in the path of the solar particles. Increased numbers of flares are expected at the moment because the Sun's normal 11-year activity cycle is approaching its peak - known as a solar maximum - this year. Dr Robert Massey, from the UK's Royal Astronomical Society, told the BBC: "What's interesting about these events is that you have them in quick succession. "It really does say that we're approaching this 11-year peak. We can't say exactly when it's going to happen, you can only work it out retrospectively."

The flares are the strongest unleashed in 2013 so far

Despite this, the Sun had - up until the most recent events - been relatively quiet in 2013. Sunspot numbers had been below values in recent years and strong flares had been infrequent. The intense bursts of energy this week were all "X-class" flares - the strongest type. These are assigned a number which gives more information about their strength: An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, and so on. The first of the recent flares, which was given an X1.7 designation, appeared at 0317 BST on Monday 13 May. That was followed by an X2.8-class flare at 1709 BST on the same day and an intense X3.2-class flare at 0217 BST on Tuesday.

Eruptions such as this one in August last year, demonstrate the raw power of our parent star

These flares - the strongest solar activity of 2013 - occurred in the space of just 24 hours. According to the Space Weather website, a fourth, X1-class flare was unleashed at 0252 on Wednesday. "These are spectacular events, an X-class flare is equivalent to a billion hydrogen bombs. We're talking about a colossal amount of energy," said Dr Massey. "The good news is that although these can cause problems - at worst - with power supplies and so on, there's really no threat to us living on the ground." When intense enough, flares can disturb the Earth's atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is happening. Flares are associated with huge eruptions of matter from the Sun's atmosphere - known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

Footage from Nasa shows massive flares on the Sun's surface

These CMEs can be even more disruptive because they are capable of sending billions of tonnes of charged gas and other particles into space. When powerful eruptions reach Earth, the charged matter can blow out transformers in power grids as well as tripping electronics on satellites. The so-called Carrington Event of 1-2 September 1859 shorted telegraph wires, starting fires in North America and Europe, and caused bright aurorae (northern and southern lights) to be seen in Cuba and Hawaii. Nasa says its Stereo-B and Spitzer spacecraft may be in the paths of the mass of particles unleashed by these recent events. The operators of those science missions can choose to put their spacecraft into a "safe mode" to protect the electronics in onboard instruments from being tripped. "It's a really important area for economic reasons because if we don't learn how to protect satellites and the equipment we depend on, there is a serious issue there," said Dr Massey.

BBC News - Four colossal Sun flares in 48 hours

See also:

Neutrinos from the cosmos hint at new era in astronomy
15 May 2013 - An experiment buried beneath the ice of the South Pole has for the first time seen the particles called neutrinos originating outside our Solar System.

They are produced in our atmosphere and in the Universe's most violent processes, but the IceCube experiment has seen the first "cosmic neutrinos". It detected 28 of the exceptionally fast-moving neutrinos - but it remains unclear exactly where they came from. The pioneering finds could herald an entirely new branch of astronomy. The results were presented on Wednesday at the IceCube Particle Astrophysics Symposium in Wisconsin, US. Researchers have gathered there to discuss the findings of the world's largest neutrino detector, occupying a cubic kilometre. It is made up of 86 strings sunk into the Antarctic ice, each with 60 sensitive light detectors strung along it like "fairy lights". As neutrinos pass, they very rarely bump into the nuclei of atoms in the ice, producing a brief flash that the detectors can catch. With more than 5,000 detectors catching flashes at different times, the direction of the neutrinos' arrival can be determined.

IceCube has more than 5,000 detectors to catch passing neutrinos

Neutrinos can be produced in our own atmosphere here on Earth - IceCube picks up about 100,000 of them a year - but previous attempts to associate them with more far-flung cosmic processes, such as those described in April 2012, have turned up nothing. However, in April this year, the IceCube collaboration reported seeing two neutrinos - nicknamed Bert and Ernie - of energies greater than a "petaelectronvolt". That is 150 times higher than the energy to which particles within the Large Hadron Collider can currently be accelerated. Now the team reports 26 more events, each higher than 50 teraelectronvolts (a twentieth of a petaelectronvolt), which they expect will also be of cosmic origin. But Francis Halzen, principal investigator on the IceCube experiment, said that "of course, there's much more to do". "It's after you find them that the work starts; these events are very difficult to analyse," Prof Halzen told BBC News.

Particle pictures

For centuries, stargazers have relied only on light of a wide range of wavelengths - many far beyond those we can see - to get pictures of the cosmos. But these first cosmic neutrino detections open the possibility for doing astronomy instead using particles - developing pictures of the Universe's most active corners by analysing the directions and energies of the neutrinos they produce. Prof Halzen recalled discussions with Frederick Reines, who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the neutrino in the mid-1950s. "He would tell me that as soon as he discovered that the neutrino was real, everybody had the idea that you had a particle that you could do astronomy with. In 1960, several people wrote rather detailed papers on how to do it."

The experiment has captured a variety of neutrino events

Only later did it become clear that a detector as monumentally large as IceCube would be required to launch such a new era in astronomy - an era that for the first time seems to be taking shape. "It is incredibly exciting to work with the final IceCube configuration," Prof Halzen said. "It not only shows that we built the right detector, it promptly delivered results. What it means for astronomy is in our future, hopefully our very near future. The tools are in place and the first harvest of events is in."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22540352

 

[whitehall]

It's the sun stupid. Leftie warmers seem to think the world began ten thousand years ago when we were emerging from a ....say it with me...a freaking ICE AGE. Question for low information lefties,...which is worse, ice ages or global warming?

 

[mamooth]

It's the sun stupid.

Then why has the world warmed as solar output dropped? You look quite stupid for declaring that a cooling sun is causing warming.

Leftie warmers

Try not to make it that obvious, your allegiance to your crank political cult. You're supposed to hide the source of your marching orders, remember?

Question for low information lefties,...which is worse, ice ages or global warming?

There's no chance of an ice age now, thus you look like a retard for implying there is.