Earth-Directed Eruption

Originally posted by Jomina
Let's see... if it's on a path to earth, these CME's would usually take.. 3/4 days? Am I remembering that correctly?

Correct, but not always. The big one in 1859 which produced the large geomagnetic solar storm which occurred, only took 18 hours.

en.wikipedia.org...

The solar storm of 1859, also known as the Solar Superstorm,[1] or the Carrington Event,[2] was the most powerful solar storm in recorded history.
From August 28 until September 2, numerous sunspots and solar flares were observed on the sun. Just before noon on September 1, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed the largest flare,[3] which caused a massive coronal mass ejection (CME), to travel directly toward Earth, taking 18 hours. This is remarkable because such a journey normally takes three to four days. It moved so quickly because an earlier CME had cleared its way.

And... the 1859 CME was not at Solar Max, or Solar Min... it happened at midpoint in the cycle. We just happened to be in the target zone.


Monthly smoothed SSN using SIDC data. X Axis denotes month of the cycle.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/7a687680c5f2.jpg[/atsimg]



[edit on 18-10-2009 by RoofMonkey]

reply to post by RoofMonkey

Charts and graphs are great for looking at what has happened, however what little I know about OUR sun is that Nothing is predictable with it.

Originally posted by Lil Drummerboy
reply to post by RoofMonkey

 

Charts and graphs are great for looking at what has happened, however what little I know about OUR sun is that Nothing is predictable with it.

Yup... which I stated here

Originally posted by RoofMonkey

...

"supposed to" assumes that the Sun's activity is a well known phenomena...

it's not.

The last Solar Max was Mar 2000 at a monthly smoothed index of 120.8. That was about nine years ago.

However, charts and graphs give you insights into activity... and under fortunate circumstances, you can get an idea of what may be normal activity. That is the purpose of my Cycle 23 to Cycle 24 transition period chart. It illustrates where we should be at... based on 254 years of recorded activity... and the start as delineated by SIDC. Now... I'm not a statistician, but the individual monthly values are falling in the Z-score range of -1.29 on average (some as high as -1.91)... which gives you pretty slim odds that a particular month will be that far out of the normal range of observed values. (Something like 4% or so) For every single month to do that? It gets so improbable that I have to question my ability to calculate it. (I was getting junk like a 0.0000000000010% chance of 15 consecutive months to do that)

All this does is illustrate that the ideas that Nassim Nicholas Taleb put forth in "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" are probably accurate. (predominately the failure of the Bell Curve to accurately model certain types of data... data that is subject to wildly influential outliers.)

But... I did the charts specifically to see just how weird the Sun's current activity is.

Now... do note that there is evidence that the Sun has a few known and postulated cycles; 11 years, 22 years, 87 years, 210 years, 2,300 years, and 6000 years. Throw these together in an interference waveform (summing them over a duration of time), you get a really complex waveform that on occasion, indicates nulls and peaks in activity over large timeframes. Some of the segments in that plot line up within 3 to 4 sunspot cycles and indicate that we may be in for a Dalton level minimum. The downside with doing this, is that it's not a perfect match, and as you have pointed out, charts are a bad predictor. Additionally, my method is likely an oversimplification of the variability cycles.

My most likely wrong interpretation of the data:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/2b1b850b3bbb.jpg[/atsimg]

At least, you better hope I'm wrong. If not, it's gonna get nasty here in a few years.




Solar Variation





[edit on 19-10-2009 by RoofMonkey]

in the general direction of Earth.

The earth is moving through space around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour.

So did it eject it in the general direction of the location the earth was, or the general direction of where the earth will be?

reply to post by calcoastseeker


The distance that the Earth travels in 1 day is about 0.986 degrees of the orbit. CME's tend to be fairly broad... encompassing several degrees. Even if it takes 4 days to reach us, odds are that we will get hit if it were pointed in our general direction.

A more telling aspect about what will happen, is if it has the same orientation as our magnetic field. The ACE satellite should be able to pick that up. Magnetic reconnection events in the tail of Earths magnetosphere generate the geomagnetic storms, and as far as I know, we have satellites looking in those areas right now doing research. This ought to be a boon for them.



Edit: Corrected per Phage's follow-up (See the next post. Link #2 is the best reference)



[edit on 19-10-2009 by RoofMonkey]

reply to post by RoofMonkey

SOHO gives us electromagnetic data. It is the solar wind which influences the magnetosphere. Data on the polarity, speed, and density of the solar wind is provided by the ACE satellite. It is this data which feeds the Real Time Magnetosphere Simulation.

A bit of information (and a cheap plug) about how to interpret the data can be found here and here.


[edit on 10/19/2009 by Phage]