Home > Cosmic Craziness > ‘Old Faithful’ Sunspot to Fire Off More Solar Flares, Scientists Say

‘Old Faithful’ Sunspot to Fire Off More Solar Flares, Scientists Say


By Mike Wall – “An active region of the sun that blasted out powerful solar storms four days in a row last week likely isn’t done yet, scientists say.

Officially, the flare-spouting region is called sunspot 1283. But space weather experts have dubbed it ‘Old Faithful,’ after the famous geyser in the United States’ Yellowstone National Park that goes off like clockwork. And the solar Old Faithful should erupt again before it dissipates, researchers said.

‘It still has a fair amount of complexity,’ said solar physicist C. Alex Young of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. ‘So we still have a pretty good chance of seeing some more stuff from this one.’

Sunspots are temporary dark patches on the solar surface caused by intense magnetic activity. Some last for hours before disappearing; others linger for days, weeks or even months.

Powerful solar storms often erupt from sunspots. These include radiation-flinging solar flares and phenomena known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — massive clouds of solar plasma that can streak through space at up to 3 million mph (5 million kph).

From Sept. 5-8, sunspot 1283 produced four big flares and three CMEs. Two of the flares were X-class events and two were M-class flares. (Strong solar flares are classified according to a three-tiered system: X-class are the most powerful, M-class are of medium strength and C-class are the weakest.)” Read more.

Solar flare could unleash nuclear holocaust across planet Earth, forcing hundreds of nuclear power plants into total meltdowns – “Forget about the 2012 Mayan calendar, comet Elenin or the Rapture. The real threat to human civilization is far more mundane, and it’s right in front of our noses. If Fukushima has taught us anything, it’s that just one runaway meltdown of fissionable nuclear material can have wide-ranging and potentially devastating consequences for life on Earth. To date, Fukushima has already released 168 times the total radiation released from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb detonated in 1945, and the Fukushima catastrophe is now undeniably the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human civilization. But what if human civilization faced a far greater threat than a single tsunami destroying a nuclear power facility? What if a global tidal wave could destroy the power generating capacities of all the world’s power plants, all at once? Such a scenario is not merely possible, but factually inevitable. And the global tidal wave threatening all the nuclear power plants of the world isn’t made of water but solar emissions.” Read more.

 

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