MidnightWatcher's Blogspot

By John Metcalfe – “This one-of-a-kind space video, captured yesterday by NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, appears to show a kamikaze comet smashing into the sun to provoke a fiery coronal mass ejection. In reality, though, it’s probably coincidence.

The comet stands virtually no chance of making it to the surface of the intensely burning solar body; heat waves would have melted it and broken it down into hot space dust millions of kilometers away. The comet’s destruction seems to be confirmed in observations made by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which show no sign of it at the moment the sun flung its wad of magnetic plasma into space.” Read more.

By Terrence Aym – “Could a superstorm generated by the sun destroy civilization as we know it in 2012?

No less than NASA thinks it’s a distinct possibility. In a remarkable move the normally conservative US space agency has taken the extraordinary step of warning the world.

The headlines reverberating around the world speak volumes: ‘Leaks discovered in Earth’s magnetic field,’ Solar storms to wreak havoc,’ ‘The end of life as we know it,’ ‘Magnetic shift to cause global superstorms.’

Can such things really happen?  NASA and the European Space Agency say yes…

Among all the countries with exposure to the solar devastation, the United States is the most susceptible.”  Read more.

“… The pot is starting to boil. ‘Finally,’ says Fisher, ‘we are beginning to see some action.’

As 2011 unfolds, sunspots have returned and they are crackling with activity. On February 15th and again on March 9th, Earth orbiting satellites detected a pair of “X-class” solar flares–the most powerful kind of x-ray flare. The last such eruption occurred back in December 2006.

Another eruption on March 7th hurled a billion-ton cloud of plasma away from the sun at five million mph (2200 km/s). The rapidly expanding cloud wasn’t aimed directly at Earth, but it did deliver a glancing blow to our planet’s magnetic field. The off-center impact on March 10th was enough to send Northern Lights spilling over the Canadian border into US states such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan.”  Read more.