Very cool. Its amazing what we don't know about the star sitting just 8 light minutes away from us.<p>For jnorthrop generally these events are effectively deflected by the Earth's magnetosphere, however we don't know what we don't know. Its hard to estimate whether or not any one of the extinction events this planet has experienced over the past was caused by solar activity.<p>I would hope it would add impetutus to efforts to surviving large changes in the Earth's envioronment by creating completely controlled environments (ideally across several planetary bodies) but I have low expectations that it will.<p>One of the science stories I've been following for a while has been the growing body of evidence that a magnetic pole reversal [1] is becoming more likely. (Note there was a hoax around it changing instantly in 2012 which has been pretty thoroughly debunked). One thing that is pretty well understood is that during reversals the magnetosphere is greatly reduced [2] which suggests that the simulataneous occurence of a CME and a reversal of the poles resulting in a reduced magnetosphere would be something to write home about.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/29dec_magneticfield.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/29dec_magnet...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.off-ladhyx.polytechnique.fr/people/willis/papers/Nature425.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.off-ladhyx.polytechnique.fr/people/willis/papers/...</a>
Was that a real-time video (i.e., shot and played at 1x speed)? If so, the matter appears to be traveling at roughly the speed of light. Greater, perhaps, indicating the video was sped up. <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=diameter+of+the+Sun+%2F+speed+of+light" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=diameter+of+the+Sun+%2F...</a><p><i>Edit…</i> If you look closely (in HD), there are timestamps, suggesting this is being played at ~3600x, or one second of playtime representing an hour in reality.
The blog post with more explanation: <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-a-huge-explosion/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/th...</a>
Forgive my ignorant question, but what if that eruption was aimed at us? Was that a mass ejection of something? If so, could that something have ruined the electronics in orbiting satellites or stripped our atmosphere?<p>Maybe I'm over-reacting but that appears to be an absolutely massive explosion.
For nice current images of the Sun, the Proba 2 satellite [1] continuously watches it and dumps some nice imagery/movies. It's ESA sponsored, and both it's sensors (SWAP producing the visuals) are interpreted by the Belgian Royal Observatory. Iirc the Belgians and the Canadians are the only ones keeping a close eye on the sun, counting sun spots and such. Makes for a nice desktop bg also!<p>[1] <a href="http://proba2.oma.be/index.html/" rel="nofollow">http://proba2.oma.be/index.html/</a>
I wish there was a way on HN to easily find out submissions that have videos in them. Often times, especially when I'm eating at my desk, I'd rather watch interesting videos than read articles, and such a feature would be of great help on HN.<p>Maybe there's a way that you guys know of (besides reading cues from the title)?
The shockwave is expected to reach earth around 1 pm EST tomorrow (5pm GMT), auroras are likely to follow after that and they should be visible quite far south.<p><a href="http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/2011/06/08" rel="nofollow">http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/2011/06/08</a>
You'd have to line up 100 Earth's end-to-end to fit inside the Sun. This was reportedly about the size of the Sun itself, so it would engulf 100 Earths. It would probably destroy more since even planets on the periphery would have all life destroyed.
Might be interesting to watch this over the next few days - <a href="http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast" rel="nofollow">http://www.gi.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast</a>
Until about the middle of February it looked as if we were going to maybe catch a break on global warming as the Sun's output was down significantly and the possibility that a Maunder type solar minimum was occurring was increasing.<p>About 2/15/11 solar output started getting back to more normal levels.<p><a href="http://www.wm7d.net/hamradio/solar/index.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.wm7d.net/hamradio/solar/index.shtml</a><p>Too bad, we could use a break.