The sun smooth, round and peaceful Except when it suddenly vomits radiation and plasma everywhere
These solar flares or coronal mass ejection CME’s can hit the earth and have some serious consequences for humanity and today ill tell you all about them and
- How exactly do they work?
- How bad could they be?
- And can we prepare for them?
Now, in a nutshell, the sun seems pretty solid but the truth is it's actually like a pool of hot plasma in fact it's so hot it rips apart atoms into nuclei which are all flowing around in the plasma, this plasma is pushed around and shaped by the suns magnetic field just like how it shapes their orbit of the solar system but magnetism is very different from gravity and is one part of dual force: Electromagnetism.
Electricity creates magnetic fields and magnetic fields create electricity. On the sun, the plasma- made of electrically charged protons and electrons creates a magnetic field as they move, which is stuck in a loop called a dynamo. It is also like a magnetic field rotating around the sun which keeps the suns magnetic field alive it also stores an enormous amount of energy and leaks out over the solar system which carries a constant bunch of solar plasma, like light rain, known as the solar wind, creating a sort of space weather.
But it isn't always calm and smooth. As the sun's plasma churns and flows around itself, its magnetic field gets all kinked and twisted. This creates knots that build up enormous amounts of energy, and when those knots break-like a tangle of springs exploding outwards the sun can vomit plasma and other awful things into the solar system.
These solar storms can come in many types, Here are some!
Like solar flares, a tidal wave of high energy races thru the solar system at the speed of light, sweeping up protons in the solar wind accelerating them into a high-speed solar-proton storm.
Then there are Coronal Mass Ejections (Or CME for short) which rips millions and even billions of tons of plasma from the sun's atmosphere, catapulting it through the solar system at speeds of 9 million km/h. and when these monsters hit Earth, nothing actually happens on earth. While even smaller storms can damage satellites, affect radio communication, or be dangerous to astronauts, space weather is harmless. Earth's atmosphere protects us from the worst effects of solar flares by absorbing blast of high up in the atmosphere, well before it reaches the surface.
The electrified plasma from a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) is deflected by the earth's magnetic field, which then diverts the energy storm into the north and south poles causing the atmosphere to glow and giving us beautiful arouras.
SOLAR HURRICANES
sometimes there are hurricanes, though. Or in the case of the sun solar superstorm and we know that they happen every once or twice every century if one were to happen today, we would first detect strong solar flares, a sort of flash before the thunder. The thunder is the CME, Coronal Mass Ejection which contains billions of hot plasma which crosses over a vast region, and when I mean vast region I don't mean 10 kilometers or 100 kilometers I mean 150 million kilometers between the Sun and Earth, and that less than a day. When it arrives, it causes a shockwave that violently compresses the earth's magnetic field and transfers energy into the magnetosphere. But things can get worse if a magnetic field of the solar hurricane is aligned to earth in just the right way, the 2 magnetic field merges so one of them being earth and the other one being the sun's deadly CME.
As the magnetic cloud pass over the earth, it stretches the earth field into a long tail. Eventually, the energy stored in the tail becomes too much to contain. It snaps and explosively releases its energy towards earth.
This is a GEOMAGNETIC STORM.
A few hundred years ago, nobody would have cared. This storm gushing over the earth is not relevant for machines made out of meat and bones by meaning humans and animals. e.c.t But it's very relevant for machines made out of metal and wire-like cars and other electronic things. Remember that dynamo magnetism creates electric currents earth in the 21st century is covered millions of kilometers with wires, transporting electricity, with a complex grid of machines that help to transport electricity possible that means a geomagnetic storm can wipe out all electricity grids.
The largest GEOMAGNETIC TO EVER TO OCCUR
The largest GEOMAGNETIC STORM was The Carrington Event and the largest geomagnetic storms ever to observed on earth massive arouras occurred as far south of the Caribbean and at that time it was in summer in some places, they were so bright that people got up, thinking the sun was rising luckily we had only one sort of modern technology: telegraph systems. But they failed all around the world. Shocking their operator and spitting out sparks of electricity and remember this happened in 1859 and today's world has more technology, and our luck might run out soon. The probability of such even happening is estimated to be 12% per decade. There is a 50/50 chance of at least one in the next 50 years.
Can we prepare for them?
As much as daily newspapers might like solar storms to send us back to the stone age, they probably won't. Fortunately, even though solar storms aren't preventable, virtually all of their scary side effects are. The engineers working the systems that keep the world running are well aware of the risks posed by solar storms. Transformers and substations can be taken offline- there can be short preventable blackouts or in other words, unplugging things. Engineers can open up extra lines to remove extra electricity and with investments and upgrades can be cheap compared to those other natural disasters require we could even protect the world’s electric grid against the scariest solar storms. But we do need to prepare. While the risk is manageable, it is real.
So while the sun bathes us in its warm and pleasant light, one day just one day it might send a worldwide phenomenon on our way.