Locations of key events are labeled in this extreme ultraviolet image of the Sun, obtained by the Solar Dynamics Observatory during the Great Eruption of August 1st. White lines trace the Sun's magnetic field.
Credit: NASA
HUNTSVILLE, USA: On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the Sun erupted, sending shock waves racing across the stellar surface, billion-tonne clouds of hot gas billowing into space. It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity.
Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big. "The August 1st event really opened our eyes," said Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, California.
"We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."
Complex magnetic connections
For the past three months, Schrijver has been working with fellow Lockheed-Martin solar physicist Alan Title to understand what happened during the 'Great Eruption'. They had plenty of data: The event was recorded in unprecedented detail by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and twin STEREO spacecraft.
With several colleagues present to offer commentary, they outlined their findings at a press conference today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
Explosions on the Sun are not localised or isolated events, they announced. Instead, solar activity is interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances. Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections - they can go off all at once, hundreds of thousands of miles apart, in a dizzyingly complex concert of mayhem.
More work for space weather forecasters
"To predict eruptions we can no longer focus on the magnetic fields of isolated active regions," said Title. "We have to know the surface magnetic field of practically the entire Sun."
This revelation increases the workload for space weather forecasters, but it also increases the potential accuracy of their forecasts.
"The whole-Sun approach could lead to breakthroughs in predicting solar activity," commented Rodney Viereck of the Space Weather Prediction Centre in Boulder, Colorado.
"This in turn would provide improved forecasts to our customers such as electric power grid operators and commercial airlines, who could take action to protect their systems and ensure the safety of passengers and crew."
In a paper they prepared for the Journal of Geophysical Research, Schrijver and Title broke down the Great Eruption into more than a dozen significant shock waves, flares, filament eruptions, and coronal mass ejections spanning 180 degrees of solar longitude and 28 hours of time.
Huh?
What? Not one mention of the effect of the sun on global warming ideas?
I think the only thing more profound than the realization here that the sun is a lot wilder than the Old Testament would let on, is that human nature hasn't changed one iota in more than a million years.
People du jour are still just as blind as bats -scientists or otherwise-.
Don Robertson
Limestone, Maine
What results can be expected from this eruption?
Since the eruption on August 1, 2010, we, in central Ohio, have had two months of extremely hot, dry weather followed by three months of below normal cold weather. Is this due to the eruption?