- 3699 - SOLAR FLARES - the Sun has hiccups? Emergency responders dealing with the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Ian in Florida and the Carolinas may have suffered extra setbacks on Sunday, October 2, 2022, as a major solar flare disrupted radio communications. The Sun has hiccups.
--------------------- 3699 - SOLAR FLARES - the Sun has hiccups?
- This solar flare, a powerful “X1“, but still the mildest form of the strongest category of flares, erupted from the Sun. Since solar flares travel at the speed of light, the burst of electromagnetic radiation caused an immediate radio blackout up to an hour long on the sun-facing side of the planet. The affected region included the whole of the U.S.
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- The radio blackout affected rescue workers using 25 MHz radios to communicate in areas where the rampage of Hurricane Ian knocked down cell phone networks. The disruption in the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere caused by the flare also made GPS positioning unavailable or less accurate. Satellites can disappear in major solar storms and it could take weeks to find them again.
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- A somewhat milder flare followed a few hours later, causing another radio blackout over the western Pacific and Australia.
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- Both flares originated from sunspot called “AR3110” in the northwestern part of the sun's visible disk and each was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME), which is a burst of magnetized particles from the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona. The two plasma clouds may now be heading to Earth, following a couple of earlier CMEs that exploded from the sun on October 1.
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- Simultaneously, a stronger-than-usual solar wind, a stream of charged particles constantly emanating from the sun, is currently blowing toward our planet from a coronal hole, an opening in the magnetic field of the sun. The combination means that the CMEs may trigger a noticeable geomagnetic storm on Earth in the coming days.
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- NOAA predicts that a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm might hit the planet on October 4, possibly causing minor power grid issues at high latitudes and affecting satellites in low Earth orbit.
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- Space weather forecasters expect more flares and CMEs in the coming days. A new, large and "complex" sunspot, “AR3112“, has emerged in the northeast and will traverse the sun's visible disk during the next two weeks. AR3112 is one of the biggest sunspots in years, stretching across 80,000 miles . It has the potential to become more active, which means a likelihood of more flares and CMEs.
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- For aurora chasers, the geomagnetic storms mean a good chance of spotting polar lights away from their usual confines around the poles. The displays might be visible as far south as the northern U.S. “Solar cycle 25“ is now well underway.
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- Solar activity, which space weather experts measure by the number of visible sunspots, rises and falls on a cycle that lasts roughly 11 years from minimum to minimum, although one cycle can be as short as nine years or as long as 13. The sun's new cycle is about two years in and should peak around 2025.
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- Cycle 25's intensity might seem to be higher than expected. This apparently high activity is partly because the cycle began around six months earlier than scientists had anticipated.
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- Current trends point to the sun having about 125 sunspots when cycle 25 peaks. That's more than the 115 sunspots visible at the peak of cycle 24, but still much lower than the 180 of cycle 23, which peaked in March 2000 and was about middling in recorded history.
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- Cycle 25 peak will likely occur around the same time as the total solar eclipse of April, 2024, which will be visible from an arc across North America stretching from Sinaloa in Mexico to Newfoundland in Canada. A more active sun sports a more dynamic corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun that we can see only when the moon blocks out the main disk. We'll have a pretty interesting corona to see during the eclipse.
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- In watching the sun, astronomers hope to gain more knowledge about the long-term trends that potentially drive these cycles. Even though scientists have compiled a continuous record of solar cycles back to the mid-18th century, with occasional data from well before that date, astronomers still don't know very much about how solar cycles change and evolve over the long term. Over the past four solar cycles going back to the 1970s, each successive cycle has had a weaker peak than its predecessor.
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- If solar cycle 25 turns out to be stronger than its predecessor, that weakening trend would end, supporting an idea called the “Gleissberg cycle“. This theory holds that cycles' peaks grow stronger then weaken in a waveform that repeats every century. The weak cycles of today seem to mimic similarly weak cycles in the early 20th and early 19th centuries, while the cycles of the mid-20th century were especially strong.
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October 4, 2022 SOLAR FLARES - the Sun has hiccups? 3697
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