By today I mean the 24th.
We are moving towards the 11 year cycle point where the sun's magnetic poles flip, which means increased activity of this nature. NASA's Heliophysics division shot these images and this fucking AWESOME video of the event with the SDO, which is also awesome.
Click image for video!!
For the uninitiated; the scale of this thing is, on a bigness scale of one to ten, fucking huge. If earth were to be put in that flare it would be an almost invisible dot in that giant plume of gas.
Sadly, the event was not pointed at us, or it would have made for some
very cool aurora.
This was a class M 3.6 flare, which is not very big compared to what the sun can do, so even if it were pointed at us, pretty lights would be the entire effect. The flare that kills us all won't be here until 2012, anyways.*
*not true at all.
Now talk about how fucking cool the sun is. I can't wait for it to get warmer out and the sun to get a little higher in the sky, because I got a solar filter for christmas and I want to look at sunspots.
Also recently got into the physics of sunspots and flares and man the sun is so awesome and we take it for granted but shit.
Sentence structure in this thread may be affected by me being wicked excited about space stuff.
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But the sun isn't really cool at all, its really quite hot...
what kind of philistine would you have to be not to appreciate that
Man I love this Universe
I can't believe I'm wasting my final hours talking on an internet forum. Might as well load up WoW
Oh man I KNOW!!
Watching that video gives me goddamn CHILLS.
Stuff like this is why I went for astrophysics in school.
Just kidding...
Oh hey the sun is awesome, in a literal sense, it inspires awe.
Opposing satellites around the sun and text messages to interested parties, what a time to be alive!
that video is so goddamn impressive when you realize that the flare there is many, many, many times larger then Earth
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I mean you can see the curvature of the sun in that image
the Earth is just a tiny dot in the middle of that flare.
Mind: Blown
The next year or two are the busiest times in the solar cycle and the first of these cycles with the SDO up and running, so between now and 2014 we are in for even more impressive videos of potentially much larger flares.
That's really exciting. This has me all worked up. My friends and family are sick to death of hearing about it, so thank Apollo for SE++!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA
Scientists are recommending that all necessary precautions be taken.
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amazing
That
is a hell of a reference, Buster
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This is a democracy goddamnit
:^::^::^:
XBLGT:Banzeye SC2: Apollo.394
Have them make shoes or something.
just a big fucking child who loves finding out some new shit
why can't everyone be like that
when you find out how to even interact with them, you tell us
Me too, Brian. Me too.
Actually..
Yeah that's a bummer, but our increased observational capacity this year means that even a slow sunspot year is going to give us a ton of awesome videos and pictures and information.
The sun is still exciting!
ok
but it's still silly because I'm not sure how the sun's energy output is divided between electromagnetic radiation and neutrinos, but I'm pretty sure the vast, vast majority is EMR which we already know how to turn into electricity.
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
Oh absolutely!
Danke
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this makes my brain explode
It is completely insane. VV Cephei A is 7,000,000,000 times the size of the sun, the sun is 1,000,000 times the size of the earth, and both are just tiny dots when you look at the galaxy, which is itself a tiny dot in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies.
It is the most impossible scale to imagine, but just the best thing to think about.
Now atoms and shit? The microcosmic universe? That can make my head hurt
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