SOLAR WATCH * Huge X8.2 Flare Sept. 10, 2017! (Updated Daily)

Adrien Mauduit @ADphotography24

Not a bad start to the night #aurora now in #Senja #Norway HEADS UP if you have clear skies!! (Even lower latitudes)

[link to twitter.com (secure)]

A Powerful Solar Storm Likely Detonated Dozens of U.S. Sea Mines During the Vietnam War
[link to twitter.com (secure)]

NASA @NASA

The Sun isn’t too hot for #ParkerSolarProbe! 🔥 Our spacecraft is alive and well after skimming by the Sun at just 15 million miles from our star's surface. Here’s the latest about our journey to “touch” the Sun:

[link to twitter.com (secure)]

How massive solar eruptions 'probably' detonated dozens of US sea mines

An extraordinary account of the impact space weather had on military operations in Vietnam in 1972 was found buried in the US Navy archives, according to a newly published article in Space Weather.

On August 4, 1972, the crew of a US Task Force 77 aircraft flying near a naval minefield in the waters off Hon La observed 20 to 25 explosions over about 30 seconds. They also witnessed an additional 25 to 30 mud spots in the waters nearby.

Destructor sea mines had been deployed here during Operation Pocket Money, a mining campaign launched in 1972 against principal North Vietnamese ports.

There was no obvious reason why the mines should have detonated. But it has now emerged the US Navy soon turned its attention to extreme solar activity at the time as a probable cause.

[link to m.phys.org (secure)]

More in link. Good read!!!

Adrien Mauduit @ADphotography24

HEADS UP #aurora starting big already at high latitudes! Senja, Norway here ! Be ready for a night of madness!

[link to twitter.com (secure)]

I find this to be a pretty big deal. Something some of us already knew happened, but to have proof...

WARTIME SPACE WEATHER--A SUNSPOT DETONATES NAVAL MINES: Researchers studying declassified Naval records have found evidence that a big sunspot may have caused dozens or perhaps even thousands of naval mines to explode off the coast of Vietnam in 1972. The solar storms of August '72 were already legendary at NASA. These new findings suggest that the event might have been even more potent than previously thought.

Get the full story. [link to spaceweatherarchive.com (secure)]

[link to spaceweather.com]

THE SOLAR WIND HAS ARRIVED: As predicted, Earth is entering a stream of solar wind flowing from a hole in the sun's atmosphere. First contact on Nov. 10th sparked faint but colorful polar auroras in the southern hemisphere, shown here in a photo taken by Ian Griffin on New Zealand's Otago Peninsula: [link to spaceweathergallery.com]

More Southern and Northern Lights are in the offing as the solar wind envelops Earth's magnetic field. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras throughout the weekend.

[link to spaceweather.com]

Lack of sunspots to bring record cold, warns NASA scientist
“It could happen in a matter of months,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center.
________________

“The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age,” wrote Dr Tony Phillips just six weeks ago, on 27 Sep 2018.

Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018 and Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding, says Phillips, editor of spaceweather.com.

Data from NASA’s TIMED satellite show that the thermosphere (the uppermost layer of air around our planet) is cooling and shrinking, literally decreasing the radius of the atmosphere.

[link to www.iceagenow.info (secure)]

Check out the latest in the SDO Gallery,
SDO Observes a Partial Lunar Eclipse
[link to sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov (secure)]


[link to twitter.com (secure)]

NWS @NWS

Today #GOES17 finished drifting to its new orbital position at 137.2 degrees west longitude. On November 15, GOES-17 we’ll start seeing the first views of Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific Ocean from GOES-17’s new orbital position! http

video
[link to twitter.com (secure)]

[link to www.nesdis.noaa.gov (secure)]

AccuWeather @breakingweather

A rocket will streak across the sky over the mid-Atlantic early Thursday morning as NASA launches a spacecraft from the Virginia coast:
[link to www.accuweather.com (secure)]
[link to twitter.com (secure)]

Earth Is Passing Through A Dark Matter "Hurricane" Right Now

Scientists have suggested that a dark matter “hurricane” might be making its way past the Sun, and it could be detectable here on Earth. Published in Physical Review D, the study led by Ciaran O'Hare from the University of Zaragoza in Spain looked at a collection of nearby stars moving in the same direction known as the S1 stream.

These are “believed to be the remnant of a dwarf galaxy that was swallowed by the Milky Way billions of years ago,” a statement from APS Physics noted. The S1 stream consisting of 30,000 stars was found last year by ESA’s Gaia satellite, which is mapping a billion stars in our galaxy. About 30 such streams have been found in our galaxy, each the remnant of a previous collision.

[link to www.physics-astronomy.org (secure)]

Halo CME @halocme

Weak active regions in solar minimum conditions. AR 12727 seems to be more persistent than AR 12726, which decayed monotonically. More flux emergence is seen in the trailing part of AR 12727 since 2018/11/16 afternoon.

video
[link to twitter.com (secure)]

AccuWeatherAstronomy @AccuAstronomy

Don't miss tonight's #LeonidMeteorShower! The best time to view the shower will be after midnight (local time) with up to 20 meteors per hour:

[link to www.accuweather.com (secure)]
[link to twitter.com (secure)]

From their chart....it was worse in 1955 and 2010. Fear mongering if you ask me.

Great posts tho John!!!

A SUNSPOT FROM THE NEXT SOLAR CYCLE: Over the weekend, a small sunspot materialized in the sun's northern hemisphere, then, hours later, vanished again. Such an occurrence is hardly unusual during solar minimum when sunspots are naturally small and short-lived. However, this ephemeral spot was noteworthy because its magnetic field was reversed--marking it as a member of the next solar cycle.

snip:
Note sunspot AR2727 just north of the sun's equator. It is a member of decaying Solar Cycle 24, the cycle that peaked back in 2012-2014. Next, compare its magnetic polarity to that of the other, unnumbered sunspot high above it. They are opposite. According to Hale's Law, this means the two sunspots belong to different solar cycles. The high latitude sunspot appears to be a harbinger of Solar Cycle 25.

Monday, Nov. 19, 2018
[link to spaceweather.com]



Last Edited by joinca on 11/19/2018 03:32 PM

cold comes from different reasons...

AN OUTBURST OF RAINBOW COLORED AURORAS:

Northern lights are often green, sometimes red, and rarely pink or blue. On Nov. 19th, an outburst of Northern Lights over Tromsø, Norway, painted the sky with all the colors of the rainbow. Aurora tour guide Marianne Bergli photographed the outburst:
[link to spaceweather.com]

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Thread: Facebook & Instagram down in major outage


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NASA Sun & Space @NASASun

After 16 years, we've retired our solar observatory RHESSI.

From its orbit around Earth, RHESSI saw more than 75,000 solar flares over its lifetime, helping scientists unravel the complexity of these events — and paving the way for even more science.

more info here:
[link to twitter.com (secure)]

WOW! Let's hope they got this fixed. Magnetic field triggers are now demonstrably unreliable. What if they were robotic nuclear missiles?

From Newsweek-- On August 4, 1972, the crew of a U.S. Task Force 77 aircraft flying near a naval minefield in the waters off Hon La observed 20 to 25 explosions over about 30 seconds. They also witnessed an additional 25 to 30 mud spots in the waters nearby.

Destructor sea mines had been deployed here during Operation Pocket Money, a mining campaign launched in 1972 against principal North Vietnamese ports.

There was no obvious reason why the mines should have detonated. But it has now emerged the U.S. Navy soon turned its attention to extreme solar activity at the time as a probable cause.
[link to www.newsweek.com (secure)]

Great visuals there. Thanks, Joinca. I may have to join Twitter after all, lol.

RHESSI was a very valuable and ground-breaking mission. RHESSI first observed gamma rays from a solar eruption.

From Space Daily-

"High energies are always interesting in astronomy," University of Minnesota solar scientist Lindsay Glesener said. "They're the biggest explosions, the hottest plasma. But flares are going on at our Sun, which is right next to us and affects us in lots of ways. When I was a grad student, it took just one conversation with Robert Lin, the principal investigator from 2002 to 2012, to convince me flares are the most fascinating thing in the universe." (snip)

"RHESSI had several firsts," Dennis said. "No one had ever imaged X-rays at this high an energy level before, or imaged gamma rays at all. RHESSI made great strides by making energy measurements with higher resolution than had previously been possible."

Solar Flares Aren't Simple

Early RHESSI observations of a strong flare on April 15, 2002, showed X-rays coming from two different places at once: one high in the Sun's atmosphere and another lower down. Researchers interpreted this to mean a huge punch of energy occurred between the two spots.

After tracking the energy in the two-sided explosion, they realized part of the explosion's energy shot high into the Sun's atmosphere and burst into a cloud of hot plasma to become a coronal mass ejection, while the other part bore down towards the surface, exploding into a flare.

These explosions - the most powerful in the solar system - came to be known as solar eruptive events, in which the Sun's strongest flares and coronal mass ejections are linked, occurring at the same time.

RHESSI introduced solar researchers to entirely new questions on the nature of flares. During an intense October 2003 flare, scientists noticed X-rays and gamma rays coming from two different places.

Although electrons and ions have different masses, scientists expected them to originate from the same spot in the flare. Since each kind of emission reflects the presence of different kinds of particles, the unexpected disparity hinted at different mechanisms guiding the movements of each type of particle. Scientists still don't fully understand this process.

Much more here:
[link to www.spacedaily.com]

Movie clip of Jan 20, 2005 X-flare:

[link to www.scholarpedia.org]

RHESSI NASA Mission Homepage w/ links to archived data:

[link to hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov (secure)]

Shine On Suntards!
:8/31-AR2674:

I received this email bout the nabble that Ninz started so I refreshed the link.


Dear Nabble user,

The forum listed below is inactive and has been scheduled for deletion in 10 days.
To prevent this forum from being deleted, visit the forum and follow the instructions.

[link to my-solar-alerts-community.48640.x6.nabble.com]

Thanks for the heads-up, Joinca!

I voted to save the site.

Hopefully, we'll have some flares before 2020.

A little more than a year ago, we had an X9 flare-- the strongest of Cycle 24. The present flare drought may continue for another 18-24 months.

:9/10-loops:

I think have figured out the special settings and computer work-arounds to resume more regular posting. Hallelujah. Only on GLP do I have to tweak my settings...hmmmnnnn.

I have a backlog of 20-30 space news posts from the past 3 months but I'll only post those relevant to the Sun-Earth cosmo-system.

Just like us GLP Suntards, scientists worldwide are scrambling to figure out SOL and the unpredictable behavior of the magnetosphere. Get ready for a multitude of missions and a glut of space weather propaganda in the next decade.

EU Funds WHOLESUN Project:

The European Research Council (ERC) will fund an ambitious solar physics project at the MPS over the next six years. The research project called WHOLESUN aims at understanding the origin of solar magnetic activity by studying the Sun in its entirety.

The WHOLESUN project is made possible by advances in supercomputing. "The project will develop numerical models of the whole Sun that will run on exascale supercomputers that perform a billion billion arithmetic operations per second," explains principal investigator Allan Sacha Brun from CEA Saclay France.

The numerical models will be used in combination with observations to tackle many unsolved mysteries in solar physics. For example, it is not known how sunspots are formed, nor what triggers the most energetic solar flares. (snip)

The grants are part of the European Union's research and innovation programme Horizon 2020. The project WHOLESUN will receive 11.2 million euros over a duration of six years.

Full report here:
[link to www.spacedaily.com]


Last Edited by Helios Maximus on 11/24/2018 01:19 AM

NASA ICON Mission launched this month to study the Ionosphere in more detail.

NASA's ICON to explore boundary between Earth and Space
by Lina Tran for GSFC News
Greenbelt MD (SPX) Nov 07, 2018

NASA heliophysics missions study a vast interconnected system from the Sun to the space surrounding Earth and other planets, and to the farthest limits of the Sun's constantly flowing stream of solar wind. ICON's observations will provide key information about how Earth's atmosphere is connected to this complex, dynamic system.
Early in the morning of Nov. 7, 2018, NASA launches the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, a spacecraft that will explore the dynamic region where Earth meets space: the ionosphere.(snip)

Depending on the energy it absorbs from the Sun, the ionosphere grows and shrinks. For that reason, scientists long thought this part of space was only affected by what happens in the space above it.

But over the past decade, a growing body of evidence has indicated the region is much more variable than we can explain with solar activity alone. The ionosphere's contents are not evenly distributed: Dense patches of its charged gases, called plasma, are scattered throughout. Eventually, researchers linked these patches to global weather patterns - large-scale events such as several hurricanes rushing across the ocean at once, or changes in cloud formation over tropical rainforests.

Though the Sun provides the energy that drives weather we experience on Earth, day-to-day weather is driven by something very different: differences in temperature and moisture, interactions between oceans and land, and regions of high and low atmospheric pressure. Still, scientists were surprised to discover that terrestrial weather and the Sun manage to meet in the middle - at the ionosphere - in a tug-of-war for control.

More here-
[link to www.spacedaily.com]

ICON Mission Home:
[link to icon.ssl.berkeley.edu]

***This article does nothing to debunk the HAARP conspiracy-- in fact, it almost supports it!

OOPS. What I thought was stale news turns out to be premature news. ICON's launch has been delayed due to weird anomalies I presume.

[link to blogs.nasa.gov (secure)]

Cluster 18-yr. update--

Space weather is no abstract concept - it may happen in space, but its effects on Earth can be significant. To help better forecast these effects, ESA's Cluster mission, a quartet of spacecraft that was launched in 2000, is currently working to understand how our planet is connected to its magnetic environment, and unravelling the complex relationship between the Earth and its parent star.(snip)

Various spacecraft are investigating the magnetic environment around the Earth and how it interacts with the solar wind. Efforts have been internationally collaborative, from observatories including ESA's Cluster and Swarm missions, NASA's Magnetospheric MultiScale mission (MMS), the Van Allen Probes, and THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms), and the Japanese (JAXA/ISAS) Arase and Geotail missions.

Cluster comprises four identical spacecraft that fly in a pyramid-like formation, and is able to gather incredibly detailed data on the complex structure and fluctuations of our magnetic environment.

More here:
[link to www.spacedaily.com]

Cluster ESA Homepage:
[link to sci.esa.int]