'The Great Eruption': Massive Solar Explosion Rocks The Sun (VIDEO)

During a press conference at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Karel Schrijver and Alan Title presented groundbreaking data from their three month study of a massive global solar eruption that took place on August 1.

Schrijver and Title, both of whom are Lockheed-Martin solar physicists, explained that the so-called "Great Eruption" consisted of over a dozen shock waves, flares, filament eruptions, and coronal mass ejections that covered half of the sun's surface and took place over a period of 28 hours.

"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," said Schrijver, according to NASA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."

Thanks to NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and a pair of STEREO space telescopes that recorded the event, scientists were able to watch the massive solar event unfold and connect the various explosions that occurred thousands of miles apart. This observance is the first of its kind.

"Researchers have known for decades that solar flares tend to bloom synchronously across vast distances," writes Fox News. "But the existence of these so-called 'sympathetic flares' had been deduced mainly from statistical arguments, researchers said, not actual observations of the events as they occurred."

Scientsts hope to use these data to accurately forecast solar disturbances. "To predict eruptions," Title told the Daily Mail, "we can no longer focus on the magnetic fields of isolated active regions. We have to know the surface magnetic field of practically the entire sun."

"We're still sorting out cause and effect," Schrijver said, according to the Daily Mail. "Was the event one big chain reaction, in which one eruption triggered another--bang, bang, bang--in sequence? Or did everything go off together as a consequence of some greater change in the sun's global magnetic field?"

The video (below, via NASA) shows the Great Eruption in extreme ultraviolet; the different colors represent a range of plasma temperatures, according to NASA.

WATCH:

KEY EVENTS FROM THE GREAT ERUPTION:

Image Credit: K Schrijver & A. Title

Comments

[smolensk-lies]

07:13 AM on 12/17/2010

can dust in the air help to cause a spark turn into a dust explosion? uh, yes. can a 'dusty' part of the galaxy, as the earth passes through it, make it easier for a massive electrical CME to make its connection to earth? YEP

10Be ice core samples.

[palindrom]

08:45 AM on 12/17/2010

Could be -- but those are radically different density regimes you're talking about. Air is a pretty good insulator because its ionized fraction is so small, so it breaks down catastrophically in sparks under conditions of high electric field, but the interstellar medium and solar winds are pretty good conductors, so sparks don't form in the same way.

[SiriusMrE]

05:36 PM on 12/17/2010

The Earth is *always* connected to the Sun's electric current sheet (commonly called the "solar wind," but charged particles in motion are the definition of an electric current). Whether or not a CME strikes the Earth, I think, is more dependent upon the position of the planet when the CME intersects our orbital path, not necessarily the dustiness of the plasma through which our system is passing.

[M33TBallz]

06:24 AM on 12/17/2010

The Sun is fun. I love the Sun. Funny Sunny. Sunny fun.

[ShahdKad3]

12:41 AM on 12/17/2010

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8197576/Solar-storm-could-knock-out-power-grids-and-satellites.html

This article by The Telegraph says "A huge solar storm is set to hit Earth on Monday with the potential to knock out power grids and interfere with communication satellites. "

[ShahdKad3]

12:32 AM on 12/17/2010

So what does this all mean? How will this effect the Earth when explosions continue?

I heard that polar caps will melt but I don't know if that's true or not.

[SiriusMrE]

05:41 PM on 12/17/2010

Besides the obvious risks to our electric infrastructure (including satellites), we may see brighter and more pervasive auroras, even in lower latitudes.

Poles are heating on planets throughout our solar system...

[LaurieLee]

06:02 PM on 12/16/2010

I remember seeing a graph that was discussing the correlation between sunspots and the number of Republicans in the US Senate. It was to illustrate the distinction between causation and correlation. The graph charted perfectly, the correlation was exquisite (until about 1986 or '87, whenever the graph was made). I'd love to see if the graph still looks so good.

[somsoc]

05:29 PM on 12/16/2010

If we get a flair like that experienced in the mid 1800's, our civilization is simply toast. Every electronic piece of equipment, and every electrical device whatsoever, will be fried outright. Moreover, the Earth will likely experience, as it did then, an unusually cold and crop failing following year worldwide. Now that is a dooms day event from science you can count on, and given scientific data, our world is about due for another such event. These events have been determined to occur quite a regular basis of about 100 - 120 yrs. We are about 40 yrs past due. Nostradumass was and is a joke as were and all such soothsayers but such is myth, this is science, you don't want to mess around with nature.

[Taper123]

05:36 PM on 12/16/2010

If only we can be so lucky as to have another "Carrington Event". I can survive, but most don't even know how to grow a grean bean anymore...

[LonosCurse]

05:58 PM on 12/16/2010

GROW a green bean? Don't they come in cans?

[MoralHumanist]

06:02 PM on 12/16/2010

It is my opinion that since the sun is an anode in the galactic circuit, you would not be wrong. Plasma is electrically active. In fact, it is by definition.

[SiriusMrE]

07:23 PM on 12/16/2010

Precisely. Our sun is a variable star.

[fcs4usc]

05:19 PM on 12/16/2010

Geez...I hope we're right about our sun lasting another few billion years or so before things start getting nasty.

[Sysaphean]

05:11 PM on 12/16/2010

Even the Sun is P.O. with conservative distortions and lies.

[TCPITS]

07:36 PM on 12/16/2010

lol

[breakingpoint]

04:48 PM on 12/16/2010

lovely

[mero909]

04:47 PM on 12/16/2010

That's pretty intense!

[johnjohn1234]

04:46 PM on 12/16/2010

"I'm all shook up."

[skyfrequency]

04:12 PM on 12/16/2010

"Scientists hope to use these data to accurately forecast solar disturbances"

Someday, and that day may never come, they will get the weather forecast here correct.

[palindrom]

10:10 PM on 12/16/2010

There's reason to think that they'll never get the weather right, no matter what. The weather system is famously unstable, which means it's inherently unpredictable -- it's not a matter of better technology. Unless we find some "magic" way of fortelling the future, we'll never know what the weather's going to be like in two weeks.

[PK3]

04:04 PM on 12/16/2010

Perfect headline news for a week featuring challenging astrological connections to the Sun from expansive Jupiter, shocking Uranus and a potentially explosive hook-up between aggressive Mars and power-generating Pluto --

for more on today's and future headlines: www.graceastrology.com

[SiriusMrE]

03:53 PM on 12/16/2010

It's a good thing current solar theory is in such great shape that it was able to predict this kind of behavior.

Oh, wait...

"'The August 1st event really opened our eyes,' said Schrijver, according to NASA. 'We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before.'"

[MoralHumanist]

06:05 PM on 12/16/2010

Since they have no idea how the sun really works. They assume it's powered from the inside, whereas it seems to be powered by the influx of electrons countering the outflow of ions.

But lets not use commons sense electrical science, lets make crap up about fusion core and nuclear reactions to cover our complete lack of understanding plasmas.

[palindrom]

08:46 PM on 12/16/2010

Well, Sirius! I thought you'd have a lot to say on this article.

For the benefit of everyone else, I'm an "establishment" scientist (PhD astrophysicist, professor for 30 years). Sirius is a proponent of the "electric sun" hypothesis, which proposes that the sun is powered by electric currents from space. There is a community of enthusiastic amateurs who fervently believe this. Every single professional astronomer and space plasma physicist I know thinks that the electric sun hypothesis is wildly, laughably, and -- more important -- provably wrong.

Sirius, by there's no way to predict this kind of event, because it's inherently unpredictable, like the weather. The failure to predict in this case does not invalidate the conventional theory of the sun at all. This is a typical straw-man rhetorical trick. The conventional theory can't predict what's unpredictable, but it does give the right neutrino flux, agreement with helioseismology, a predictive theory of the hertrzsprung-russell diagram, the stellar mass-luminosity-radius relation, a natural explanation for solar energy production, an accurate match to stellar spectra, and so on, and on, and on. You simply --- do -- not -- know -- what -- you -- are -- talking --- about. I do.

[SiriusMrE]

09:51 PM on 12/16/2010

I would expect no other response from a high priest of the church of the big bang. As you can see, though, I am not alone here.

You can *prove* what's at the center of the Sun? You can *prove* that plasma does not behave electrically? You can *prove* that galactic--and stellar and planetary--spin is not caused by rotating Birkeland currents? You can *prove* that space plasmas are perfect conductors, and that magnetic fields can be "frozen in?" They often radiate in radio frequencies, don't they? How is it that they radiate energetically if there is no power input? Is that some kind of "dark matter\energy\flow" thing? Dark magic dust that was sprinkled throughout the Universe in just the places in just the right amounts? Do you have links to your papers?

I am interested if the "conventional theory" predicted all of the things that you now tout that it explains so well. Or, was the theory--and computer model--fixed to fit the observations?

Is electricity not also natural? At least it is a real force whose formative power can be lab tested, and does not require exotic matter\energy\flow that no one has ever seen outside of an equation or computer model.

[Velvettazz]

03:50 PM on 12/16/2010

Kinda creepy with the cataclysmic movies like "2012 and Knowing"...only drawing an inference here..:)

[Venmaker1]

04:33 PM on 12/16/2010

I want my voucher for the arc NOW! LOL