Space In General

From today's edition of Spaceweather.com:

THE STAGE IS SET FOR AURORAS: A minor CME struck Earth's magnetic field on Aug. 27th (~0100 UT). At first the impact had little effect. Now, however, Earth is passing through the CME's strongly-magnetized wake. Our planet's magnetic field is linking up with the CME's, setting the stage for G1-class geomagnetic storms and high-latitude auroras. Aurora alerts: SMS Text.

SOLAR TSUNAMI AND CME (UPDATED): Sunspot AR2859 erupted on Aug. 26th, producing a C3-class solar flare: movie. The flare, however, was not the main attraction. The eruption also caused a massive "solar tsunami." Watch the shadowy wave ripple across the sun in this false-color ultraviolet movie from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:


The expanding circular shadow is a wave of hot plasma and magnetism. Based on the time it took to reach the next sunspot, halfway around the sun, the tsunami was traveling faster than 110,000 mph.

Solar tsumanis always herald a CME, and this one was no exception. Soon after the tsunami broke, SOHO coronagraphs detected a plasma cloud leaving the sun: movie.

Update: NOAA analysts have modeled the CME's trajectory. They predict an Earth impact during the late hours of Aug. 29th, possibly sparking G1-classgeomagnetic storms through midday on Aug. 30th. Aurora alerts: SMS Text.


SOLAR RADIO BURST: When sunspot AR2659 exploded on Aug. 26th, shortwave loudspeakers on the dayside of Earth erupted with static. "It was a solar radio burst," reports Thomas Ashcraft, who recorded the sounds from his observatory in rural New Mexico. Click to listen:


Take another look at the "solar tsunami," above. Much of the static Ashcraft recorded is caused by that shock wave rippling through the sun's atmosphere. Plasma waves in the ionized corona naturally emit radio noise. Ham radio operators, military radar installations, and radio astronomers have been picking up these sounds since the 1940s. You can do it yourself from your own backyard.

"As I write, the sun just produced another very strong radio burst, which really packed a punch on my spectrograph!" says Ashcraft. In other words, stay tuned for more...
 
Just stumbled on this video. Long ago I was watching a YouTube channel called Suspicious0bservers. It was about space weather and how the Sun affects climate on Earth. At first, his videos looked legit but the more I saw, the more it became obvious that he's pushing some pseudoscience stuff like "electric universe" and "earthspots" and claimed to be good at predicting earthquakes. I thought Dotini is posting his stuff in this thread but he doesn't. I was wrong. They may look informative, but contain fake information. I also wasn't expecting that he could be so aggressive towards debunking.
It just shows how easy it can be to brainwash people and how dangerous they can be.
 
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Just stumbled on this video. Long ago I was watching a YouTube channel called Suspicious0bservers. It was about space weather and how the Sun affects climate on Earth. At first, his videos looked legit but the more I saw, the more it became obvious that he's pushing some pseudoscience stuff like "electric universe" and "earthspots" and claimed to be good at predicting earthquakes. Dotini is posting his stuff in this thread. They may look informative, but contain fake information. I also wasn't expecting that he could be so aggressive towards debunking.
It just shows how easy it can be to brainwash people and how dangerous they can be.

I don't recall posting anything from that source. Pretty much everything I post on this thread comes from Spaceweather.com, which is a NASA affiliate.

The Sun does influence weather and climate, of course. But I don't deny human-induced climate change.
 
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I don't recall posting anything from that source. Pretty much everything I post on this thread comes from Spaceweather.com, which is a NASA affiliate.

The Sun does influence weather and climate, of course. But I don't deny human-induced climate change.
Yeah, I got confused... I apologize for accusing you of posting those things.
 
Like other celestial bodies, Earth has its own magnetosphere. It seems that our magnetosphere has cycles (measured in millions of years) which affect climate and extinction events.

 
From today's edition of Spaceweather.com:

EARTH-DIRECTED SOLAR FLARE: Today began with an explosion on the sun. Just after UT midnight on Sept. 8th, sunspot AR2864 unleashed a C2-class solar flare: movie. A pulse of UV radiation ionized Earth's atmosphere, briefly disturbing shortwave radio propagation around the Pacific Rim: map. The explosion might have hurled a CME into space; confirmation is pending fresh data from SOHO. Aurora alerts: SMS Text.

UNEXPECTED SOLAR WIND GUST: A gust of solar wind hit Earth's magnetic field on Sept. 7th. The sharp uptick in solar wind speed was unexpected, arriving too soon to be a CME from the B7-class solar flare only two days earlier. Whatever it was, it made this happen:


"At 2.30 a.m. on Sept. 8th, I woke up and had a look outside," says photographer Thomas Kast of Oulu, Finland. "Wowsers, nearly the whole sky was full of auroras! Got the camera and ran onto the front yard. This is a photo from the back of my camera, when a strong green band rose quickly and brightened the night sky."

The gust of solar wind was not as sharp as a CME, but it did carry some strong magnetic fields in its wake, much like a CME would. Let's call it "CME-like." Meanwhile, auroras have been reported over Scotland, too.
 
Astronomers have been studying the effects of a binary star system where one star collapsed into a neutron star (or possibly a black hole), and its larger counterpart sucked it up while swelling into a supergiant. Not surprisingly, interstellar cannibalism is just as messy as you'd think.

The remains of the first star, without the nuclear processes required to counteract the immense gravity its mass creates, will collapse into an ultra-dense neutron star or the gravitational singularity of a black hole, phenomena collectively known as compact objects.

We are now left with a massive star approaching the end of its lifespan orbited by a much smaller, but still gravitationally immense, compact object. When the second star swells up into a supergiant, it finds a compact object already there: in fact, the supergiant may increase in size to such an extent that it expands past the orbit of the compact object and the smaller body ends up inside the larger one. What then follows is the worst case of indigestion in the galaxy.

The compact object starts sucking in material from the star's outer layers, while at the same time the interaction of the compact object's orbit and the rotation of the star flings massive quantities of it out into space in a huge spiral of gas.

This process continues for a few hundred years, with the compact object moving deeper and deeper beneath the star's surface, throwing off spiralling streams of gas all the way, until it finally reaches the core.

At this point the interaction between the two binary partners, which has been very energetic but seems oddly sedate in human terms – centuries are not a denomination of time that are often used in reference to stars – suddenly becomes very explosive indeed.

Material from the star's core interacts with the intruder, creating a superhot disk of material expanding outwards and immense jets of energy and matter blasting out perpendicular to the disk at close to the speed of light. These emissions collide with slower-moving matter around the star with incredible energy, creating a blast of X-rays that you can see from 480 million light years away.
 
Starbase is in for a near direct hit from Tropical Storm Nicholas. They have lowered the big crane in preparation. Hopefully Booster 4 and Starship 20 will be fine on their stands. They are pressurized to increase their strength at all times.

Meanwhile, Inspiration 4 has a target lift-off time.

 
A strong M class flare and subsequent CME are probably heading straight for Earth. Minor geomagnetic disturbances may result.
From today's edition of Spaceweather.com:

M-CLASS SOLAR FLARE: Sunspot AR2871 exploded on Sept 23rd (0442 UT) producing a strong M3-class solar flare. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash:


Type II and Type IV solar radio bursts in the flare's immediate aftermath suggest that a CME was produced as well. If so, it is probably heading almost directly for Earth. Confirmation is pending fresh data from SOHO coronagraphs. Stay tuned. Solar flare alerts: SMS Text.
 
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Booster 4 was removed from the launch stand on Saturday so that it can clear the way for the chopsticks to be installed on the launch tower. The chopsticks, as they are nicknamed, are the arms that will stack both halves of the rocket onto the launch stand, and will catch the boosters when they return to the launch site. Still seems like an absolutely crazy idea but I think we are about to witness one of the greatest feats of engineering in our lifetime.



 
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It does look like it's going to be a great feat of engineering. But at the same time i do wish the FAA would be more strict with Musk and Space X. For some of the great things he's achieved, the guy himself and the way he does business, i find very questionable indeed.
 
It does look like it's going to be a great feat of engineering. But at the same time i do wish the FAA would be more strict with Musk and Space X. For some of the great things he's achieved, the guy himself and the way he does business, i find very questionable indeed.
They're not being any less strict, not sure where that comes from. If they were any less strict than normal, this rocket would have flown by now.
 
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