Coronal Mass Ejection, brilliant lightshow
The Sun’s roaring again and it’s usually bad news when that happens. An active sunspot, Sunspot 1302, has suddenly grown vigorous and released a vast amounts of highly energetic charged particles hurtling out of the Sun. It released a huge solar flare on the 24th of September and its hyperactivity continued for some days. The activity was caught by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory or SDO.
NASA warned that a huge Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) or a Solar Flare was in progress. The CME occurred at about 8:15 AM EST, on the 26th of September. Upon reaching Earth this will cause a huge geomagnetic storm, interfering with radio communications everywhere. This will also produce scintillating auroras near the poles of the Earth.
(Publisher’s note: According to some scientists the right solar flare might be responsible for the blackouts of the last September 26 that left in the dark almost 10 million people of Chile in Santiago and surrounding areas. )
This is Big!
Scientists use a Kp-index to indicate the enormity of the Solar flare. It is a scale from 0 to 9, 0 indicating no activity and 9 indicating hyperactivity. It tells us whether there is a significant geomagnetic storm caused due to Solar activity, with any reading above Kp=4 denoting a geomagnetic storm. The 26th September solar flare was marked Kp=8! The solar flare was so huge that it could be heard on all radios across the world. Here’s a video from NASA.
The solar flare was marked as a X1.9 category flare, indicating that it had some X-ray components to it. However, this is much lower than the X6.9 solar flare on 9th August or even the X2.2 flare on 15th February this year.
Article from Techie Buzz site | Monday, 26th Sep 2011 |
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