The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #143736 Message #3320583
Posted By: Don Firth
09-Mar-12 - 04:02 PM
Thread Name: Tech: Solar Flare Warning
Subject: RE: Tech: Solar Flare Warning
I really hate to rain on all the running around in circles and screaming in panic, but anyone who didn't hear the news about the solar storm probably won't notice much of anything.
The sun is not a Cepheid variable. Cepheid variables are yellow supergiant stars that go through a regular cycle of increasing and decreasing luminosity, and because of their very regular periodicity, astronomers can use them to judge distances to far galaxies (I'm not quite sure how this works; it's slide-rule or calculator territory, and I'm still trying to master the abacus).
But—the sun IS a variable star. It doesn't vary by much, compared to other yellow G-class main-sequence stars (generally quite stable, fortunately for us!), but it does go through regular cycles. Every eleven years it goes through an increase in sun spot activity. They are eddies in the convection currents in the sun's magnetic field, and they release a lot of energy in the form of solar flares. The sun has been fine-tuning its magnet fields now for billions of years, and right now it's moving toward the peak in its eleven-year cycle.
During a solar flare, the solar system gets hosed with a lot of charged particles. But due to the earth's magnetic field and its ionosphere, much of it gets intercepted and diverted before it can fry your toenails.
This is one of the reasons for the uproar some years ago over the possibility of vast quantities of spray-can propellants messing up the ionosphere. And, for that matter, anything else that can degrade the ozone layer. The ozone layer in the upper atmosphere protects us human beans and other critters from periodic blasts of radiation from the sun.
About the worst that solar flares and other sun spot activity does is that it CAN screw up things like radio and television reception and mess with other things that make use of magnetic fields. Cell phones, wireless networks, maybe. Hissy radio reception for a day or two, maybe. Your non-cable connected television going in a bit wonky during "Wheel of Fortune," for example.
But particularly spectacular Northern Lights, because it's up in the ionosphere where most of the interaction takes place and it tends to zero in around the earth's magnetic poles.
But—it happens every eleven years and lo! we're still here. . . .
Don Firth