Giant Sunspot Developing on Farside of the Sun

Hey guys,

Today I went to spaceweather.com to see if they had any updates on sunspot 720 (which we were all talking about two weeks ago). Well.... they have graphics up that indicate that a second, gigantic sunspot has suddenly popped up on the far side of the sun. If you look at the farside imagery, it appears that this spot is more than twice the size of 720 (as it hasn't been named yet, it is indicated on the projection with a '?'). There have also been reports of massive eruptions on the farside this week.

Is this the largest sunspot ever?
www.spaceweather.com...


Scroll down a little to see the report concerning what's going on the other side of the sun. The top of the page is concerned with the observable side of the sun only. Note how the graphic includes both 720 and this new spot (indicated with a '?').

[edit on 2-2-2005 by onlyinmydreams]

Looking through Sky News I found this story.


www.sky.com...


Not sure if this has anything to do with your story but I found it interesting as I was at work and my mobile wouldnt work like it usually does..................took an age to send texts and wouldnt make calls either. Do not know if any of this is related to this story or not.

Is anyone else becoming slightly alarmed at the increased amount of very large X class flares. I thought we were supposed to be in a low activity period. What the hell is going on?

Originally posted by skychief
Is anyone else becoming slightly alarmed at the increased amount of very large X class flares. I thought we were supposed to be in a low activity period. What the hell is going on?

Not sure whats going on, however lets not lose sight of the fact we are orbiting a star and we really know "F" all about it and what it is trully capable of.

Don't worry about it, there is nothing you / we can do anyway. Enjoy life or whats left of it.

wow that's crazy. how big is the spot 720?

Tahlen

[edit on 2-2-2005 by Tahlen]

do we have any comprehension of the upper size limit of solar flares?


do we know anything specific about mega-flares? i'd like to know what the size range of a megafare is.

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Hey, we have only been keeping visible records of the Sun for little over a few hundred years and have looked through material dating and values for what we beloved to have happened in the past. We have absolutely no idea what it's going to do tomorrow or next decade, we can only speculate... Don't worry as the spots are large there is little chance that things will align and it will affect Earth too harshly. We only have ~ another 100 years or so until humanity starts seeding other parts of the Solar System and there is a chance that some of these could be further out by space propulsion and physics breakthroughs...

I have wondered a lot about this myself recently. What if our star is dying and we just don't realize it yet?

Originally posted by crisko
I have wondered a lot about this myself recently. What if our star is dying and we just don't realize it yet?

Well, technically it is over a very long period of time, but regardless, whatever the sun does is absolutely beyond our control and influence. So why worry about it? In the couple of seconds before the big chunk of sun or solar flair flash boils the atmosphere off the planet, all this worry about global warming is going to seem pretty trivial...

Yer, in many ways our sun is our god, it created life and it can take it away, and theres nothing we can do about it.

im not worried about it all. I'm just curious how big the spot is for reference. Have not had much time to search it. one of my friends said 720 is about the size of jupiter. this accurate?

Tahlen

720 is roughly equal to the size of Jupiter if I remember correctly.

The ? sunspot is about 3 times bigger, and should be travelling around onto our side of the sun sometime around the end of the first week of February.

I believe the biggest solar flare on record was an X28, but I'm not 100% on that. This most recent sunspot has the potential to emit some seriously powerful CME's on par with that X28. Nothing to do but wait and see. I find it odd though, that the scientific community is almost completely ignoring what appears to be a very bad omen.

I hope they're in closed door meetings figuring out what to do, what to say to the people. No way of knowing unless you're a part of the international space community.

A bright note, I think the far side of the sun is more prone to these giant anomalies. They often fade partially or completely by the time they make it around to our side.

720 could last months, who knows. The larger one is still a complete unknown, but I imagine we'll get some pretty nice auroras if nothing else.

actually, I thought that 720 was abouyt five times the size of Jupiter. that would make '?' 10-12 times the size of jupiter.

Right now James McCanney is on coast to coast. He's saying, among other things, that the solar wind is acting weird right now.

Remember that pic of that UFO looking thing with the two rays going to the sun? What was that all about and could that have anything to do with this? Just wondering, dont want to sound stupid or anything.

imo i think its just a natural occurence. who knows though, maybe the et's are blasting holes in the sun exposing its guts! nobody can be sure

Tahlen

cmptr
I think that was chalked up to something like a lens flare. A cluster of high energy protons striking the instruments renders false positives like that, similar to the tendency of bright white areas to 'zebra' when printed on a low resolution printer. It's a data anomaly, probably not a spaceship. No worries.

onlyinmydreams
As far as the solar wind, we had some very strange readings 1-2 weeks ago. The wind was extremely dense, and moving faster than the range SOHO provides for. I think SOHO measures solar wind in the 200-800 km/sec range. Couple of weeks ago, the wind was travelling at over 1k km/sec, with a density greater than 2 protons per centimeter. That's pretty anomalous if I understand the situation correctly. That still going on? I thought it had died down..

There's nothing wrong in sun, it has been doing this for much longer time than there has been some life which later developed to not so intelligent animal called human.

And that new "sunspot" might be group of smaller spots.

In early September in 1859, telegraph wires suddenly shorted out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires. Colorful aurora, normally visible only in polar regions, were seen as far south as Rome and Hawaii.

A space storm's impact is measured in nano-Teslas (nT), Brekke explained. The lower the figure, the more powerful the storm. A moderate storm can be around -100 nT; extreme and damaging storms have been logged at around -300 nT.
The 1989 coronal mass ejection that knocked out power to all of Quebec, Canada measured -589 nT, Brekke said. The 1859 perfect storm was estimated to have been -1,760 nT. Brekke used three exclamation points in his e-mail delivering that number.

www.space.com...


It was sunspot 486 which generated that X28 flare.


Fortunately CME was directed away from earth, otherwise we might have lost "couple" satellites...

I hear solar flares are good for repairing ozon holes, send more flares!

well, judging by the info posted on spaceweather.com today it looks like those super spots petered out as the swung around in our direction.

Oh well... guess I'll have to postpone my end of the world party

Yes, smaller than anticipated, but still pretty impressive...