- 3655 - SUN - solar flares and ejections. A plume of "dark plasma" hurled from the sun will be engulfed to form a "cannibal" coronal mass ejection which will sideswipe the Earth on Thursday, August 18, 2022, causing a strong “G3 geomagnetic storm“.
--------------------- 3655 - SUN - solar flares and ejections
- The "dark plasma explosion" was first spotted by solar observers on Sunday, August 14 as it erupted from a sunspot on the sun's surface at a speed of roughly 1.3 million mph. It was tearing through the sun's atmosphere, creating a coronal mass ejection (CME).
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- A CME is explosive jets of solar material. Then, on Monday, August 15, another CME, created by the collapse of a gigantic magnetic filament, was launched from the sun.
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- Sunspots are areas on the sun's surface where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electrical charges, knot into kinks before suddenly snapping. The resulting release of energy launches bursts of radiation called solar flares, or plumes of solar material called coronal mass ejections.
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- CMEs can also be launched by the collapse of unstable solar filaments, which are huge, suspended tubes of electrified gas, or plasma, that worm their way through the sun's atmosphere according to the whims of the star's magnetic field.
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- The two eruptions together will merge to form a cannibal coronal mass ejection. Cannibal CMEs occur when one fast-moving solar eruption overtakes an earlier eruption in the same region of space, gobbling up the charged particles to form a giant, combined wavefront that, upon reaching Earth, triggers a powerful geomagnetic storm.
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- When it arrives at Earth, the dark plasma plume, named because of its comparatively cooler, darker appearance, will cause a G3 geomagnetic storm.
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- Geomagnetic storms occur when planets with strong magnetic fields, like our own, absorb the high speed barrage of solar debris from CMEs. During these storms, Earth's magnetic field gets compressed slightly by waves of highly energetic particles.
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- These particles trickle down magnetic-field lines near the poles and agitate molecules in the atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light to create colorful auroras, that make up the Northern Lights.
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- Geomagnetic storms are classified from G1 to G5 according to their severity. G3 storms are strong geomagnetic storms, meaning that the oncoming sun blast could bring the dazzling aurora as far south as Illinois and Oregon. G3 storms can cause intermittent problems for low-frequency and satellite navigation; increased drag on low-Earth orbit satellites; and may require some power systems to make voltage corrections.
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- More extreme geomagnetic storms can disrupt our planet's magnetic field powerfully enough to send satellites tumbling to Earth, and scientists have warned that extreme geomagnetic storms could even cripple the internet.
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- This storm comes as the sun ramps up into its most active phase of its roughly 11-year-long solar cycle. Astronomers have known since 1775 that solar activity rises and falls in cycles, but recently, the sun has been more active than expected, with nearly double the sunspot appearances.
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- Scientists anticipate that the sun's activity will steadily climb for the next few years, reaching an overall maximum in 2025 before decreasing again.
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- Other stars go through this same activity with even more violence. Astronomers have concluded that the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse quite literally blew its top in 2019, losing a substantial part of its visible surface and producing a gigantic Surface Mass Ejection (SME). This is something never before seen in a normal star’s behavior.
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- Our Sun routinely blows off parts of its tenuous outer atmosphere, the corona, in an event known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). But the Betelgeuse SME blasted off 400 billion times as much mass as a typical CME!
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- The monster star is still slowly recovering from this catastrophic upheaval. Betelgeuse continues doing some very unusual things right now; the interior is sort of bouncing.
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- These new observations yield clues as to how red stars lose mass late in their lives as their nuclear fusion furnaces burn out, before exploding as supernovae. The amount of mass loss significantly affects their fate.
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- We’ve never before seen a huge mass ejection of the surface of a star. We are left with something going on that we don’t completely understand. It’s a totally new phenomenon that we can observe directly and resolve surface details with Hubble. We’re watching stellar evolution in real time.
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- The titanic outburst in 2019 was possibly caused by a convective plume, more than a million miles across, bubbling up from deep inside the star. It produced shocks and pulsations that blasted off the chunk of the photosphere leaving the star with a large cool surface area under the dust cloud that was produced by the cooling piece of photosphere. Betelgeuse is now struggling to recover.
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- Weighing roughly several times as much as our Moon, the fractured piece of photosphere sped off into space and cooled to form a dust cloud that blocked light from the star as seen by Earth observers. The dimming, which began in late 2019 and lasted for a few months, was easily noticeable even by backyard observers watching the star change brightness.
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- One of the brightest stars in the sky, Betelgeuse is easily found in the right shoulder of the constellation Orion.
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- Even more fantastic, the supergiant’s 400-day pulsation rate is now gone, perhaps at least temporarily. For almost 200 years astronomers have measured this rhythm as evident in changes in Betelgeuse’s brightness variations and surface motions. Its disruption attests to the ferocity of the blowout.
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- Though our Sun has coronal mass ejections that blow off small pieces of the outer atmosphere, astronomers have never witnessed such a large amount of a star’s visible surface get blasted into space. Therefore, surface mass ejections and coronal mass ejections may be different events.
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- Betelgeuse is now so huge now that if it replaced the Sun at the center of our solar system, its outer surface would extend past the orbit of Jupiter. NASA’s Webb Space Telescope may be able to detect the ejected material in infrared light as it continues moving away from the star.
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- Scientists think the largest solar storm ever witnessed during contemporary history was the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion
1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles fried telegraph systems all over the world and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.
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- If a similar event were to happen today, scientists warn, it would cause trillions of dollars in damage and trigger widespread blackouts, much like the 1989 solar storm that released a billion-ton plume of gas and caused a blackout across the entire Canadian province of Quebec.
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August 18, 2022 SUN - solar flares and ejections 3655
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