Sinister Security: Solar flares

Massive Solar Storm That Will Slam Earth TODAY Could Knockout Power Supplies, Damage Satellites And Trigger Stunning Auroras

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A huge solar storm is heading for Earth, and it's likely to hit tomorrow. The storm could knockout satellites, disrupt power supplies and spark stunning displays of the Northern Lights. It was created last week by an enormous explosion in the sun's atmosphere known as a solar flare, and charged particles from that flare are now on their way to our planet.

The arrival of the solar storm coincides with the formation of 'equinox cracks' in Earth's magnetic field, which form around the equinoxes on March 20 and September 23 each year. These cracks weaken our planet's natural protection against charged particles and could leave commercial flights and GPS systems exposed to the incoming storm. The cracks also mean stargazers are more likely to catch glimpses of the Northern lights this week.

This may include parts of Scotland and northern England, as well as the 'northern tier' of the US including parts of Michigan and Maine.

A huge solar storm is heading for Earth, and it's likely to hit tomorrow. It may trigger the Northern Lights in parts of Scotland and northern England. This animation shows the aurora forecast for Wednesday 14 and Thursday 15 March (time in GMT is shown top right)

The charged, magnetic particles from the solar storm can interfere with machinery in Earth's orbit as well as at the planet's surface, such as GPS systems and radio signals. They can also threaten airlines by disturbing Earth's magnetic field. Very large flares can even create currents within electricity grids and knock out energy supplies.

'A minor geomagnetic storm watch is now in effect for the 14 and 15 March, 2018. Aurora may be visible at high latitudes,' the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wrote in a statement. The particles, which came from the sun after solar flares took place on March 6 and 7, could cause 'weak power grid fluctuations' and a 'minor impact on satellite operations,' according to the NOAA.

NASA said the first of the two flares - classified in the potent X class and facing directly at the Earth - was the biggest this year. It was one of the largest of this cycle known as the solar minimum, which began in early 2007. Geomagnetic storms are ranked on a severity scale, with G at the bottom, R in the middle and S at the top.

The charged particles, which came from the sun after solar flares took place on March 6 (pictured) and 7, could knockout satellites, disrupt power supplies and spark stunning displays of the Northern Lights

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that the forecast suggests the solar storm will be a G-1 or 'minor' storm. This could become a G-2 'moderate storm' depending on how the charged particles hit Earth. The event coincides with the formation of 'equinox cracks'.

On March 20 and September 23 each year, the Earth and sun line up so that day and night are of roughly equal length. But the equinoxes also cause cracks to open up in Earth's magnetic field which stay open for hours.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that the forecast suggests the solar storm will be a G-1 or 'minor' storm. Pictured is the aurora forecast at 9:00pm GMT (5:00pm ET) tomorrow

NASA and the NOAA keep track of solar events using an array of telescopes and probes which help generate geomagnetic weather forecasts. Researchers also study the sun to learn more about its structure as well as obtain data to make predictions about different types of solar flares. These include solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections, which are large clouds of plasma and magnetic field that erupt from the sun.

Solar flares and particles ejected via coronal mass ejections are associated with dark spots on the sun's surface. These are areas of intense magnetic activity, and when the magnetic fields in a sunspot cross each other, it can result in an energy explosion, known as a solar flare, which sends radiation into space.

Solar flares only impact Earth when they occur on the side of the sun facing the Earth. Sometimes, these explosions can send out coronal mass ejections - large clouds of plasma and magnetic field that erupt from the sun.

The event coincides with the formation of 'equinox cracks' in the sun, which form around the equinoxes on March 20 and September 23. On these dates the Earth and sun line up so that day and night are of equal length. Pictured is an equinox crack that formed in March 2012

Forecasters monitor these events, and when a storm looks likely to have a significant impact, engineers can shut down certain systems on satellites, or prepare for impacts on the power grid. The sun has an 11-year cycle of sunspot activity, with the last maximum having taken place in April 2014. This summer, NASA is set to launch a spacecraft called Parker Solar Probe, which will travel closer to the sun than any other previous mission.

It will fly by Venus and travel into the corona - the sun's upper atmosphere, with the aim of learning more about the particles that are ejected by the sun.

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Powerful Flare from Star Proxima Centauri Detected with ALMA

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Space weather emitted by Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our stars (Sun), may make that system rather inhospitable to life after all. Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a team of astronomers discovered that a powerful stellar flare erupted from Proxima Centauri last March.

This finding, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, raises questions about the habitability of our solar system’s nearest exoplanetary neighbor, Proxima b, which orbits Proxima Centauri.

At its peak, the newly recognized flare was 10 times brighter than our sun’s largest flares, when observed at similar wavelengths. Stellar flares have not been well studied at the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths detected by ALMA, especially around stars of Proxima Centauri’s type, called M dwarfs, which are the most common in our galaxy.

“March 24, 2017, was no ordinary day for Proxima Cen,” said Meredith MacGregor, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C., who led the research with fellow Carnegie astronomer Alycia Weinberger. Along with colleagues from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, David Wilner and Adam Kowalski, and Steven Cranmer of the University of Colorado Boulder — they discovered the enormous flare when they reanalyzed ALMA observations taken last year.

The flare increased Proxima Centauri’s brightness by 1,000 times over 10 seconds. This was preceded by a smaller flare; taken together, the whole event lasted fewer than two minutes of the 10 hours that ALMA observed the star between January and March of last year.

ESO/NRAO/NAOJ ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 meters

Stellar flares happen when a shift in the star’s magnetic field accelerates electrons to speeds approaching that of light. The accelerated electrons interact with the highly charged plasma that makes up most of the star, causing an eruption that produces emission across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

“It’s likely that Proxima b was blasted by high energy radiation during this flare,” MacGregor explained, adding that it was already known that Proxima Centauri experienced regular, although smaller, X-ray flares. “Over the billions of years since Proxima b formed, flares like this one could have evaporated any atmosphere or ocean and sterilized the surface, suggesting that habitability may involve more than just being the right distance from the host star to have liquid water.”

The brightness of Proxima Centauri as observed by ALMA over the two minutes of the event on March 24, 2017. The massive stellar flare is shown in red, with the smaller earlier flare in orange, and the enhanced emission surrounding the flare that could mimic a disk in blue. At its peak, the flare increased Proxima Centauri’s brightness by 1,000 times. The shaded area represents uncertainty. Credit: Meredith MacGregor, Carnegie.

An earlier paper that also used the same ALMA data interpreted its average brightness, which included the light output of both the star and the flare together, as being caused by multiple disks of dust encircling Proxima Centauri, not unlike our own solar system’s asteroid and Kuiper belts.

But when MacGregor, Weinberger, and their team looked at the ALMA data as a function of observing time, instead of averaging it all together, they were able to see the transient explosion of radiation emitted from Proxima Centauri for what it truly was.

“There is now no reason to think that there is a substantial amount of dust around Proxima Cen,” Weinberger said. “Nor is there any information yet that indicates the star has a rich planetary system like ours.”

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

Credit: nrao.edu

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Scientists Have Proposed To Build an Earth Sized Shield to Protect Earth from the Sun

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In today's modern, fast-paced world, human activity is very much reliant on electrical infrastructure. If the power grids go down, our climate control systems will shut off, our computers will die, and all electronic forms of commerce and communication will cease. But in addition to that, human activity in the 21st century is also becoming increasingly dependent upon the infrastructure located in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

Aside from the many telecommunications satellites that are currently in space, there's also the International Space Station and a fleet of GPS satellites. It is for this reason that solar flare activity is considered a serious hazard, and mitigation of it a priority. Looking to address that, a team of scientists from Harvard University recently released a study that proposes a bold solution – placing a giant magnetic shield in orbit.

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The study – which was the work of Manasavi Lingam and Abraham Loeb from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicist (CfA) – recently appeared online under the title "Impact and Mitigation Strategy for Future Solar Flares". As they explain, solar flares pose a particularly grave risk in today's world, and will become an even greater threat due to humanity's growing presence in LEO.

Solar flares have been a going concern for over 150 years, ever since the famous Carrington Event of 1859. Since that time, a great deal of effort has been dedicated to the study of solar flares from both a theoretical and observational standpoint and thanks to the advances that have been made in the past 200 years in terms of astronomy and space exploration, much has been learned about the phenomena known as "space weather".

At the same time, humanity's increased reliance on electricity and space-based infrastructure have also made us more vulnerable to extreme space weather events. In fact, if the Carrington event were to take place today, it is estimated that it would cause global damage to electric power grids, satellites communications, and global supply chains.

The cumulative worldwide economic losses, according to a 2009 report by the Space Studies Board ("Severe Space Weather Events–Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts"), would be US$10 trillion, and recovery would take several years. And yet, as Loeb explained to Universe Today via email, this threat from space has received far less attention than other possible threats.

“In terms of risk from the sky, most of the attention in the past was dedicated to asteroids,” said Loeb. “They killed the dinosaurs and their physical impact in the past was the same as it will be in the future, unless their orbits are deflected. However, solar flares have little biological impact and their main impact is on technology. But a century ago, there was not much technological infrastructure around, and technology is growing exponentially. Therefore, the damage is highly asymmetric between the past and future.”

To address this, Lingham and Loeb developed a simple mathematical model to assess the economic losses caused by solar flare activity over time. This model considered the increasing risk of damage to technological infrastructure based on two factors. For one, they considered the fact that the energy of a solar flares increases with time, then coupled this with the exponential growth of technology and GDP.

What they determined was that on longer time scales, the rare types of solar flares that are very powerful become much more likely. Coupled with humanity's growing presence and dependence on spacecraft and satellites in LEO, this will add up to a dangerous conjunction somewhere down the road. Or as Loeb explained:

“We predict that within ~150 years, there will be an event that causes damage comparable to the current US GDP of ~20 trillion dollars, and the damage will increase exponentially at later times until technological development will saturate. Such a forecast was never attempted before. We also suggest a novel idea for how to reduce the damage from energetic particles by a magnetic shield. This was my idea and was not proposed before.”

To address this growing risk, Lingham and Loeb also considered the possibility of placing a magnetic shield between Earth and the Sun. This shield would be placed at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1, where it would be able to deflect charged particles and create an artificial bowshock around Earth. In this sense, this shield would protect Earth's in a way that is similar to what its magnetic field already does, but to greater effect. Based on their assessment, Lingham and Loeb indicate that such a shield is technically feasible in terms of its basic physical parameters.

They were also able to provide a rudimentary timeline for the construction of this shield, not to mention some rough cost assessments. As Loeb indicated, such a shield could be built before this century is over, and at a fraction of the cost of what would be incurred from solar flare damage.

“The engineering project associated with the magnetic shield that we propose could take a few decades to construct in space,” he said. “The cost for lifting the needed infrastructure to space (weighting 100,000 tons) will likely be of order 100 billions of dollars, much less than the expected damage over a century.”

Interestingly enough, the idea of using a magnetic shield to protect planets has been proposed before. For example, this type of shield was also the subject of a presentation at this year's "Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop", which was hosted by NASA's Planetary Science Division (PSD).

This shield was recommended as a means of enhancing Mars' atmosphere and facilitating crewed mission to its surface in the future. During the course of the presentation, titled "A Future Mars Environment for Science and Exploration", NASA Director Jim Green discussed how a magnetic shield could protect Mars' tenuous atmosphere from solar wind.

This would allow it to replenish over time, which would have the added benefit of warming Mars up and allowing liquid water to again flow on its surface. If this sounds similar to proposals for terraforming Mars, that's because it is! Beyond Earth and the Solar System, the implications for this study are quite overwhelming. In recent years, many terrestrial planets have been found orbiting within nearby M-type (aka. red dwarf) star systems.

Because of the way these planets orbit closely to their respective suns, and the variable and unstable nature of M-type stars, scientists have expressed doubts about whether or not these planets could actually be habitable. In short, scientists have ventured that over the course of billions of years, rocky planets that orbit close to their suns, are tidally-locked with them, and are subject to regular solar flares would lose their atmospheres. In this respect, magnetic shields could be a possible solution to creating extra-solar colonies.

Place a large shield in orbit at the L1 Lagrange point, and you never have to worry again about powerful magnetic storms ravaging the planet! On top of that, this study offers a possible resolution to the Fermi Paradox. When looking for sign of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI), it might make sense to monitor distant stars for signs of an orbiting magnetic shield.

As Leob explained, such structures may have already been detected around distant stars, and could explain some of the unusual observations astronomers have made:

“The imprint of a shield built by another civilisation could involve the changes it induces in the brightness of the host star due to occultation (similar behaviour to Tabby's star) if the structure is big enough. The situation could be similar to Dyson's spheres, but instead of harvesting the energy of the star the purpose of the infrastructure is to protect a technological civilisation on a planet from the flares of its host star.”

It is a foregone conclusion that as time and technology progress, humanity's presence in (and reliance on) space will increase. As such, preparing for the most drastic space weather events the Solar System can throw at us just makes sense and when it comes to the big questions like "are we alone in the Universe?", it also makes sense to take our boldest concepts and proposals and consider how they might point the way towards extra-terrestrial intelligence.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

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The Sun is Acting Pretty Strange Right Now

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Seven days. Seven flares. Is the end of times upon us?

A week ago, the Sun unleashed its biggest solar flare in more than a decade, a monster X9.3 storm that knocked out radio communications on Earth. This was the second of the week, but the Sun was just getting started. Over the next few days, flare after flare erupted from the Sun, all from the same region – AR 2673. Yesterday’s 8.2 flare was the latest, causing the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) to issue its latest in a string of warnings.

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These flares were accompanied by coronal mass ejections (CMEs), huge eruptions of stellar material that can cause geomagnetic storms on Earth. These can hamper satellites in orbit and put astronauts in danger, along with creating powerful aurorae. Oddly though, the Sun is heading towards the solar minimum – its period of least activity. So what’s going on, and why has it been so active?

“This is not uncommon,” Rodney Viereck from NOAA told IFLScience. “When an active region emerges it sometimes produce several flares over the course of hours to days.”

The declining phase of the 11-year solar cycle is actually statistically the most likely time to see the biggest solar events, like large solar flares. So this is really not that unusual.

“All of these solar flares and the associated solar energetic particles and geomagnetic storms at this phase of the solar cycle simply means that the Sun is behaving normally,” said Viereck.

Phew.

That being said, solar flares can pose a danger to us. They can create layers in the ionosphere that absorb radio waves, preventing things like airlines and emergency services communicating on high-frequency radio. They can also increase radiation levels for astronauts and even passengers on airlines. With this latest flare, the SWPC warned astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) not to go outside on any spacewalks.

Region 2673 has now rotated out of view from Earth, so it won’t be sending any more CMEs our way. But these events highlight that, when it wants to, the Sun can put on a hell of a show. And we always need to be prepared for when it does.

“Geomagnetic storms can induce additional unwanted current on electric power lines and, in extreme cases, destroy large electric transformers and bring down portions of the electric power grid. On the bright side geomagnetic storms produce aurora, which is one of the only ways that the general public can experience space weather.” said Viereck.

For now though, we can rest easy.

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Sinister Security

Massive Solar Storm That Will Slam Earth TODAY Could Knockout Power Supplies, Damage Satellites And Trigger Stunning Auroras

Powerful Flare from Star Proxima Centauri Detected with ALMA

Scientists Have Proposed To Build an Earth Sized Shield to Protect Earth from the Sun

The Sun is Acting Pretty Strange Right Now

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