Space Weather

This is important, really important to our survival!

You've probably seen a video of a hydrogen bomb exploding. Pretty wild, isn't it! Just think of billions of these bombs going off every second. That's what's happening in the core of the Sun.

The Sun is that thing that rises every day to warm our planet and provide the light that allows plant life to thrive and us to live. For centuries, ancient civilizations thought the Sun was a god. We, of course, realize that it's a giant ball of hydrogen that has most of the mass of the solar system. It would take 1.3 million Earths to fill up the Sun. The Sun is 93 million miles away and it has been fusing hydrogen into helium for 4.5 billion years and will do so for another 5 billion years before it dies.

On September 1-2, 1859, the Sun shot a coronal mass ejection at the Earth and blew out the telegraph lines in what has been recorded as the most powerful geomagnetic storm ever. If such a storm happened today it would blow out our power grids and satellites and plunge the world into a dark age where no technology would function. The 1859 incident was known as the Carrington Effect, named for Richard C. Carrington, a British astronomer who observed a flash of light on the Sun's projected image.

What this event means to us is that we need to be wary of the very star that provides energy to our planet, but we know very little about the Sun despite the fact that it's so close.

The Sun's surface is a boiling, swirling sea of tangled magnetic lines that causes sunspots, flares and coronal mass ejections. The magnetic fields of the Sun are chaotic because of the convection zone where energy coming from the core passes through to the surface or photosphere of the Sun. Charged particles passing through a hydrogen, helium mix cause the generation of magnetic lines. These lines are tangled on the surface in a constant maelstrom of magnetic storms that shoot charged particles, mostly protons, into the corona of the Sun. These particles are accelerated away from the Sun at millions of miles per hour and are the main component of the solar wind that buffets the Earth's magnetic field, which concentrates at the poles to form the aurora. Without the magnetic field to protect us, the solar wind would erode Earth's atmosphere and destroy all life.

It turns out the Sun's surface is 6000 degrees but the corona is millions of degrees. Scientists are unable to explain this. What's even more important is that it is difficult to predict the course of a coronal mass ejection, which is essentially part of the Sun's corona being blasted out into space. These ejections consist of millions of tons of charged particles accelerated to millions of miles per hour. If one of these ejections smacks directly into our atmosphere, it will essentially destroy our technology, knocking out our power grids and our satellites, and the outages cold last months if not years, essentially causing a catastrophe for the human race.

What's needed is a thorough examination of the corona of the Sun. Up until recently, the only way to study the Sun is from probes at distance because the Sun's energy and heat is too great for anything that would approach it. Nevertheless, NASA is sending a Solar Probe Plus, a spacecraft that will study the corona up close, approximately 3.7 million miles from the surface of the Sun. At this distance it will have to survive extreme radiation and heat. Hopefully, this probe will allow astronomers to be able to understand the magnetic fields of a coronal mass ejection and explain why the corona is so much hotter than the surface of the Sun. This will provide Earth based command centers with advanced warning of a potential disaster.

A space weather disaster of the Carrington Effect variety could be avoided. All that would need to happen is to shut down the power grids and turn off the satellites until it passes. Hopefully, this will avoid a dark age on Earth. But, you know and I know that no one takes heed of things like this. So, good luck fellow Earthlings!

Thanks for reading.