A Massive Sunspot That Could Unleash Significant Solar Flares Is Pointed Right at Us:
Sunspots can throw off powerful solar flares that disrupt radio communications on Earth and sometimes impact the power grid. Space weather watchers are keeping a close eye on a dark and volatile spot on the sun that's grown dramatically this week.
Between Sunday and Monday, Sunspot AR3038 more than doubled in size, making it several times wider than Earth's diameter, and it's continued to expand in the past 48 hours, according to NASA heliophysicist C. Alex Young, writing at EarthSky.
Sunspots are darkened, cooler areas on the sun's surface with unstable magnetic fields, and they can produce solar flares and coronal mass ejections of charged particles and plasma. These flares and ejections occasionally cause chaos for electrical and radio communications systems here on Earth.
Over the last day, the mega-sunspot has let off a pair of minor, C-class solar flares while pointing straight at Earth, but Astronomer Tony Phillips reports at Spaceweather.com that "Sunspot AR3038 has a 'beta-gamma' magnetic field that harbors energy for (medium strength) M-class solar flares."
Generally M-class flares aren't that big of a deal, but earlier this year, a flurry of M-class flare activity created a geomagnetic storm strong enough that SpaceX reported it had essentially fried a number of its Starlink satellites.
Our magnetosphere prevents the radioactive eruptions from harming life on the surface of Earth, but it does pose a risk to our communications systems, astronauts in space and even the electrical grid on the ground, particularly more powerful X-class flares.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @11:19AM
Now I don't have to worry about War, Covid, Economy, Governments or Climate.
That feels better, knowing there is only one thing to worry about.
I welcome our new Solar Flare overlords!
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday June 27 2022, @11:57AM
The importance of solar flares as an excuse is that your average person doesn't really understand what they do, but will want to pretend that they do. So you can get away with such moves as:
"Sorry, honey, I can't take out the trash today - solar flares!"
"Sorry, boss, I can't get that report to you in time for the meeting - solar flares are screwing up my Internet."
"Sorry, Your Honor, I didn't see that 10-year-old girl due to the solar flares."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Ingar on Monday June 27 2022, @12:08PM (1 child)
You can spot 3038 on today's HMI Magnetogram [nasa.gov].
Note: link points to the latest image, permalink not available because a widespread power outage at Stanford [nasa.gov] took out the SDO Data Center.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @05:19PM
FTFY
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @12:57PM (2 children)
Your tinfoil hats will deflect the radiation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @08:58PM
They get awfully warm though
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2022, @02:08AM
The problem is, most people make aluminum foil hats, not tinfoil. Aluminum doesn't work, it has to be tin. It's actually not that easy to find actual tin foil these days. The government is obviously keeping actual tin in foil form off the market, for their obviously nefarious purposes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @04:37PM (3 children)
If something is "pointed right at us" on the Sun, shouldn't it appear to be in the center from our perspective? Of course the shower of high-energy particles from the region spreads out so it doesn't have to be exactly there to affect us; but based on the picture in TFA, it's not "pointed right at us", unless the stream follows some kind of predictable arc where that particular position is in fact the one that optimizes impact. Is that the case or not?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @04:49PM
How about re-reading the article again and taking note of the use of future-tense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @04:55PM
It is not even on the side of the sun facing us anymore. The story is from days ago.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday June 27 2022, @05:52PM
Not very safe for work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaazFYTrQ_A [youtube.com]