Sun unleashes jaw-dropping filament eruption — but Earth dodges the blast (photo)

[Admin]

GOES-19 satellite captures breathtaking footage as a towering solar filament erupts over the sun's eastern limb.

Sun unleashes jaw-dropping filament eruption — but Earth dodges the blast (photo) : Read more

 

[Classical Motion]

I wish they would show those videos in real time. Or at least intermittent time stamp frames for brevity.

It would give a more correct sense of the size, velocity and distance…….. of what we are watching. I believe it to be misleading about the size of the sun and the size of space. And the motion thru space. Those videos are warp speed.

I don’t believe matter can move that fast for that size area. Even though that phase of matter is the quickest.

And if that was real time, please correct me. I am not a scientist.

 

[Joexo]

What would have happened if it pointed towards our planet?

 

[billslugg]

It would take about 8 hours for such a plume to spurt out. You cannot see the motion of a prominence when you view it through an amateur telescope.
This was a whopper, all right. Had it been pointed at Earth the damage could have been historic. There are other factors also. It strongly depends upon the direction of the Earth's magnetic field as compared to the cloud's magnetic field at the time the cloud arrives at Earth. If it is opposite to Earth's it will facilitate the particle's journey down our own field lines, if oriented the same, it will bounce away.
It usually takes about two days to get here, however if another Coronal Mass Ejection, CME swept space clear a day or so earlier, the new one could get here in less than a day.

 

[Joexo]

Had it been pointed at Earth the damage could have been historic

For example what could have happened?

 

[COLGeek]

For example what could have happened?

Communications failures, satellite damage, impact to electrical grid, lots of the typical stuff associated with solar flare impacts, I would think. Possibly higher, more widespread, impacts than normal.

The Impact of Flares

 

[Classical Motion]

That ejected stripe is about 40-50 earth diameters long. That’s just a quick guess. If it hit us in an incident manor, we could be bombarded for weeks.

No space communications and maybe no grid. If it takes out our grid transformers, it could take years to repair.

 

[billslugg]

Grid transformers are not kept in stock, it takes about a year to make one. They'd speed it up, of course, but there would be many people go many months without power. Be prepared to go it on your own for several months!

 

[Classical Motion]

Can you imagine the world wide demand for grid transformers?

They work so well and take abuse and don't wear out, so we don't stock them.

That could bite us.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

If we had the means to accurately predict the effects of a particular solar mass ejection, then we could pre-emptively disconnect the vulnerable equipment to protect it.

Yes, that would mean intentionally taking the whole electrical grid down for a short period of time. But, that is better than taking it down for a year - especially without any warning or preplanning.

With pre-planning, and development and deployment of the necessary backup devices and measures, we should be able to "weather" something like the Carrington Event mass ejection. But, we need to determine in advance what devices need to be disconnected/shut down to protect them and what devices can be used during the event without destroying them.

Further, we also need to be able to determine the magnetic orientation of the plasma coming at us to predict whether we need to take the protective actions. That is a problem. Currently, we rely on the satellites that we have always between Earth and the Sun at the L1 LaGrange Point. But, that is not far enough away to give us the amount of lead time we would like to prepare for impact. But, there is no other stable orbit location farther from Earth that is always between us and the Sun. And, it is out of the question that we could launch a probe directly at the Sun from Earth that could travel fast enough to give us more lead time - the solar material is traveling so fast that our probe would not even get to the LaGrange Point before the plasma can get there from the Sun.

So, we need some sort of remote sensing capability to determine the orientation of the magnetic field of the plasma promptly after it is ejected from the Sun. Do we have any ideas about how that could be done?