Solar Croissants

Even NASA could not resist the obvious lead line. We are actually beginning to map the ‘fine structure’ of the solar system and we are making rather exciting and unexpected discoveries. The stuff we are seeing is dramatic in space but it appears that the planets are well up to brushing all this activity aside. Think of it as an expanded view of the northern lights. We all know that it will not affect anyone but the show is great.

In the end we will end up mapping the magnetism throughout the solar system because it will matter in terms of eventual navigation that takes advantage of magnetic field strength. See my article on the reverse engineering of the UFO.

Anyway, do run the NASA movie showing the croissant forming. At least it isn’t smoke rings.

The Surprising Shape of Solar Storms

April 14, 2009: This just in: The Sun is blasting the solar system with croissants.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/14apr_3dcme.htm?list1109684

Researchers studying data from NASA's twin STEREO probes have found that ferocious solar storms called CMEs (coronal mass ejections) are shaped like a French pastry. The elegance and simplicity of the new "croissant model" is expected to dramatically improve forecasts of severe space weather.

"We believe we can now predict when a CME will hit Earth with only 3-hours of uncertainty," says Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab, who helped develop the model. "That's a four-fold improvement over older methods."

Coronal mass ejections are billion-ton clouds of hot magnetized gas that explode away from the sun at speeds topping a million mph. Sometimes the clouds make a beeline for Earth and when they hit they can cause geomagnetic storms, satellite outages, auroras, and power blackouts. The ability to predict the speed and trajectory of a CME is key to space weather forecasting.

"This is an important advance," says Lika Guhathakurta, STEREO program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. "From a distance, CMEs appear to be a complicated and varied population.

What we have discovered is that they are not so varied after all. Almost all of the 40-plus CMEs we have studied so far with STEREO have a common shape--akin to a croissant."

Thousands of CMEs have been observed by NASA and European Space Agency spacecraft, but until now their common shape was unknown. That's because in the past observations were made from only a single point of view. The STEREO mission has the advantage of numbers. It consists of two probes that flank the sun and photograph explosions from opposite sides. STEREO's sensitive wide-field cameras can track CMEs over a wider area of sky than any other spacecraft, following the progress of the storm all the way from the sun to the orbit of Earth.

"STEREO has done what no previous mission could," notes Guhathakurta.

Vourlidas says he is not surprised that CMEs resemble French pastries. "I have suspected this all along. The croissant shape is a natural result of twisted magnetic fields on the sun and is predicted by a majority of theoretical models."

He offers the following analogy: Take a length of rope and hold one end in each hand. Start twisting the ends in opposite directions. Twist, twist and continue twisting until the middle of the rope is a fat knotted mess.

"That's how CMEs get started—as twisted ropes of solar magnetism. When the energy in the twist reaches some threshold, there is an explosion which expels the CME away from the sun. It looks like a croissant because the twisted ropes are fat in the middle and thin on the ends."







http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/3dcme/avourlidas_vid_03.mov
Right: A computer model of a croissant-shaped CME. Models like this can be rapidly fit to real CMEs as soon as they are observed, allowing forecasters to accurately estimate the speed and trajectory of the storms: movie. Credit: NASA.
The shape alone, however, does not tell the full story of a CME. The contents of the CME must be considered, too. How much plasma does it contain? What is the orientation and strength of its internal magnetic field? When a CME strikes, the havoc it causes will depend on the answers—answers the croissant model does not yet provide.
"There is more work to do. We must learn to look at a CME and not only trace its shape, but also inventory in contents," says Guhathakurta. "We are halfway there."
Eventually, the quest to learn what lies inside the croissant will be taken up by other spacecraft such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory, slated to launch in August 2009, and Solar Probe+, a daring mission (still on the drawing board) to fly close to the sun and actually enter these storms near their source.
STEREO isn't finished, though. The two probes are continuing their journeys to opposite sides of the sun for a 24/7, 360-degree view of the star. Along the way, they'll actually run into a few CMEs and have the chance to sample the 'croissants' in situ.
Stay tuned for updates.

Lagrange Point Look See

In a way I am surprised that this particular mission was not undertaken decades ago. It is the one place near Earth that might hold material that has been captured for millions of years and held in one locale.

In time the better L4 and L5 spots will be those associated with Jupiter. these are less likely to have been disturbed.

Of course that likilhood of disturbance would have made me skeptical of success and that surely explains the tardiness getting there.

Anyway, the look see is now underway and material ibeen detected, but insufficient to act as an attractor. This suggests the the region is likely to be 'dirty'. I suppose we should anticipaqte low velocity hits during this passage. Of course the solar wind may be ample to cleanse the system.

anyway we can look forward to a detailed report.

STEREO Hunts for Remains of an Ancient Planet near Earth

04.09.2009
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/09apr_theia.htm?list1109684

April 9, 2009: NASA's twin STEREO probes are entering a mysterious region of space to look for remains of an ancient planet which once orbited the Sun not far from Earth. If they find anything, it could solve a major puzzle--the origin of the Moon.

"The name of the planet is Theia," says Mike Kaiser, STEREO project scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "It's a hypothetical world. We've never actually seen it, but some researchers believe it existed 4.5 billion years ago—and that it collided with Earth to form the Moon."

Right: An artist's concept of one of the STEREO spacecraft

The "Theia hypothesis" is a brainchild of Princeton theorists Edward Belbruno and Richard Gott. It starts with the popular Great Impact theory of the Moon's origin. Many astronomers hold that in the formative years of the solar system, a Mars-sized protoplanet crashed into Earth. Debris from the collision, a mixture of material from both bodies, spun out into Earth orbit and coalesced into the Moon. This scenario explains many aspects of lunar geology including the size of the Moon's core and the density and isotopic composition of moon rocks.

It's a good theory, but it leaves one awkward question unanswered: Where did the enormous protoplanet come from?

Belbruno and Gott believe it came from a Sun-Earth Lagrange point.

Sun-Earth Lagrange points are regions of space where the pull of the Sun and Earth combine to form a "gravitational well." The flotsam of space tends to gather there much as water gathers at the bottom of a well on Earth. 18th-century mathematician Josef Lagrange proved that there are five such wells in the Sun-Earth system: L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5 located as shown in the diagram below.

When the solar system was young, Lagrange points were populated mainly by planetesimals, the asteroid-sized building blocks of planets.

Belbruno and Gott suggest that in one of the Lagrange points, L4 or L5, the planetesimals assembled themselves into Theia, nicknamed after the mythological Greek Titan who gave birth to the Moon goddess Selene.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/theia/lagrangepoints_strip.jpg


Above: Sun-Earth Lagrange points. The STEREO probes are about to pass through L4 and L5. Solar observatories often park themselves at L1 while deep space observatories prefer L2. [more]

"Their computer models show that Theia could have grown large enough to produce the Moon if it formed in the L4 or L5 regions, where the balance of forces allowed enough material to accumulate," says Kaiser. "Later, Theia would have been nudged out of L4 or L5 by the increasing gravity of other developing planets like Venus and sent on a collision course with Earth."

If this idea is correct, Theia itself is long gone, but some of the ancient planetesimals that failed to join Theia may still be lingering at L4 or L5.
"The STEREO probes are entering these regions of space now," says Kaiser. "This puts us in a good position to search for Theia's asteroid-sized leftovers."

Just call them "Theiasteroids."

Astronomers have looked for Theiasteroids before using telescopes on Earth, and found nothing, but their results only rule out kilometer-sized objects. By actually entering L4 and L5, STEREO will be able to hunt for much smaller bodies at relatively close range.

Right: This dynamical simulation shows how asteroids linger in the gravitational well of a Lagrange point of the Sun-Jupiter system. The principle of Sun-Earth Lagrange points is the same. Credit: Prof. Aldo Vitagliano/SOLEX.

"The search actually began last month when both spacecraft rolled 180 degrees so that they could take a series of 2-hour exposures of the general L4/L5 areas. In the first sets of images, amateur astronomers found some known asteroids and new comet Itagaki was imaged just a couple of days after the announcement of its discovery. No Theiasteroids however."

Hunting for Theiasteroids is not STEREO's primary mission, he points out. "STEREO is a solar observatory. The two probes are flanking the sun on opposite sides to gain a 3D view of solar activity. We just happen to be passing through the L4 and L5 Lagrange points en route. This is purely bonus science."

"We might not see anything," he continues, "but if we discover lots of asteroids around L4 or L5, it could lead to a mission to analyze the composition of these asteroids in detail. If that mission discovers the asteroids have the same composition as the Earth and Moon, it will support Belbruno and Gott's version of the giant impact theory."

The search will continue for many months to come. Lagrange points are not infinitesimal points in space; they are broad regions 50 million kilometers wide. The STEREO probes are only in the outskirts now. Closest approach to the bottoms of the gravitational wells comes in Sept-Oct. 2009. "We have a lot of observing ahead of us," notes Kaiser.

Readers, you may be able to help. The STEREO team is inviting the public to participate in the search by scrutinizing photos as they come in from the spacecraft. If you see a dot of light moving with respect to the stars, you may have found a Theiasteroid. Links to the data and further instructions may be found at sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil.

Let the hunt begin!

Superflare Superthreat

The only good thing about a super flare is that it is brief. This article is a reminder that they really exist. And it will still take a lot of time to recover services, particularly if all the transformers are fried.

Which truly begs the question regarding how well the system is protected? This is not difficult, but certainly costs money. It is surely not impossible to protect transformers in particular and those are the things that take time. Breakers protect cables surely even though most everything else is likely to be fried.

I doubt is any of our computers are protected. So while protecting the grid is a case of avoiding design negligence, the rest of the system needs regulatory standards.

This report is a loud warning that we have not done what common sense tells us to do. We need to pay attention. Why are our transformers and motors not wrapped simply in foil? Or is that just too cheap and brain dead easy? Of course most computers are in metal casings which do most of the job.

However, the mere fact that 130 main transformers are even vulnerable tells me that this issue is not on any design engineer’s radar.

It is simple to put the rules in place to lower exposure and simple obsolescence will resolve it all over twenty years. The only thing that requires immediate attention is the transformer inventory. There we are talking about Hurricane Katrina style negligence

Severe Space Weather

01.21.2009 January 21, 2009: Did you know a solar flare can make your toilet stop working?

That's the surprising conclusion of a NASA-funded study by the National Academy of Sciences entitled Severe Space Weather Events—Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts. In the 132-page report, experts detailed what might happen to our modern, high-tech society in the event of a "super solar flare" followed by an extreme geomagnetic storm. They found that almost nothing is immune from space weather—not even the water in your bathroom.

The problem begins with the electric power grid. "Electric power is modern society's cornerstone technology on which virtually all other infrastructures and services depend," the report notes. Yet it is particularly vulnerable to bad space weather. Ground currents induced during geomagnetic storms can actually melt the copper windings of transformers at the heart of many power distribution systems.

Sprawling power lines act like antennas, picking up the currents and spreading the problem over a wide area. The most famous geomagnetic power outage happened during a space storm in March 1989 when six million people in Quebec lost power for 9 hours: image.

According to the report, power grids may be more vulnerable than ever. The problem is interconnectedness. In recent years, utilities have joined grids together to allow long-distance transmission of low-cost power to areas of sudden demand. On a hot summer day in California, for instance, people in Los Angeles might be running their air conditioners on power routed from Oregon. It makes economic sense—but not necessarily geomagnetic sense. Interconnectedness makes the system susceptible to wide-ranging "cascade failures."

To estimate the scale of such a failure, report co-author John Kappenmann of the Metatech Corporation looked at the great geomagnetic storm of May 1921, which produced ground currents as much as ten times stronger than the 1989 Quebec storm, and modeled its effect on the modern power grid. He found more than 350 transformers at risk of permanent damage and 130 million people without power. The loss of electricity would ripple across the social infrastructure with "water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on."

"The concept of interdependency," the report notes, "is evident in the unavailability of water due to long-term outage of electric power--and the inability to restart an electric generator without water on site."

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/severespaceweather/collapse.jpg


Above: What if the May 1921 superstorm occurred today? A US map of vulnerable transformers with areas of probable system collapse encircled. A state-by-state map of transformer vulnerability is also available: click here. Credit: National Academy of Sciences.

The strongest geomagnetic storm on record is the Carrington Event of August-September 1859, named after British astronomer Richard Carrington who witnessed the instigating solar flare with his unaided eye while he was projecting an image of the sun on a white screen. Geomagnetic activity triggered by the explosion electrified telegraph lines, shocking technicians and setting their telegraph papers on fire; Northern Lights spread as far south as Cuba and Hawaii; auroras over the Rocky Mountains were so bright, the glow woke campers who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning. Best estimates rank the Carrington Event as 50% or more stronger than the superstorm of May 1921.

"A contemporary repetition of the Carrington Event would cause … extensive social and economic disruptions," the report warns. Power outages would be accompanied by radio blackouts and satellite malfunctions; telecommunications, GPS navigation, banking and finance, and transportation would all be affected. Some problems would correct themselves with the fading of the storm: radio and GPS transmissions could come back online fairly quickly. Other problems would be lasting: a burnt-out multi-ton transformer, for instance, can take weeks or months to repair. The total economic impact in the first year alone could reach $2 trillion, some 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina or, to use a timelier example, a few TARPs.

What's the solution? The report ends with a call for infrastructure designed to better withstand geomagnetic disturbances, improved GPS codes and frequencies, and improvements in space weather forecasting. Reliable forecasting is key. If utility and satellite operators know a storm is coming, they can take measures to reduce damage—e.g., disconnecting wires, shielding vulnerable electronics, powering down critical hardware. A few hours without power is better than a few weeks.

NASA has deployed a fleet of spacecraft to study the sun and its eruptions. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the twin STEREO probes, ACE, Wind and others are on duty 24/7. NASA physicists use data from these missions to understand the underlying physics of flares and geomagnetic storms; personnel at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center use the findings, in turn, to hone their forecasts.
At the moment, no one knows when the next super solar storm will erupt. It could be 100 years away or just 100 days. It's something to think about the next time you flush.