The Mysterious Solar Flares
“This flare produced the largest solar radiation signal on the ground in nearly 50 years,” said Dr. Richard Mewaldt of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, a co-investigator on NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft. “But we were really surprised when we saw how fast the particles reached their peak intensity and arrived at Earth.”
The relationship between Earth and the solar flares of the Sun have proven to be quite destructive in communication satellites and long-distance land systems, according to the Canadian Space Agency. The high-energy particles which are known to form such beautiful auroras, also can cause other forms of destructions, such as power grids and undersea cables. Space weather events require up-to-date research to protect Earth and its inhabitants from such havoc.
Presently, there are serious changes taking place between Earth and the Sun, with scientists recognizing that there are consequences developing that are far-reaching for the inhabitants of Earth. Electromagnetic radiation always hits Earth first, traveling at the speed of light. When a solar flare hits, it does so by heating and swelling the entire atmosphere, with a huge possibility of changing the middle atmosphere. But during a very large flare, the ultraviolet radiation can cause an increase in Earth’s ozone, with long-term affects.
On May 24, 2005, NASA reported that “the most intense burst of solar radiation in five decades accompanied a large solar flare on January 20, shaking space weather theory and highlighting the need for new forecasting techniques.” The solar flare tripped radiation monitors throughout the planet Earth, scrambling detectors on spacecraft within minutes. Arriving too quickly to warn future interplanetary astronauts, it was reported as one of the most extreme example of a flare with radiation storms. With the first sign of the January flare, within 15 minutes the storm of energetic protons impacted Earth instead of the usual couple of hours.
What was most noticeable about the storm was that it shook the current theory about the origin of proton storms at Earth. It was believed that proton storms at Earth were caused by shock waves in the inner solar system, as coronal mass ejections plow through interplanetary space. But the protons from this flare originated from the Sun.
“This is surprising”, says Lin, “because in the past we believed that the protons making gamma-rays at the flare were produced locally and the ones at the Earth were produced instead by shock acceleration in interplanetary space. The similarity of the spectra suggests that they are the same.”
This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 2:57 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
