MILD LEONIDS: Earth is passing through a stream of debris from Comet Tempel-Tuttle, source of the annual Leonid meteor shower. The Leonids are famous because they sometimes come in storms of a thousand or more meteors per hour. This year’s stream crossing is not a central one, however, so the display is expected to be mild. Forecasters predict no more than 15 meteors per hour when the shower peaks on Nov. 17th. [meteor gallery] [meteor radar]
HUMONGOUS ERUPTION: A truly gigantic explosion happened on the sun yesterday. On Nov. 16th, magnetic fields snaking halfway across the sun’s southern hemisphere erupted in tandem, producing a prominence so big, it doesn’t fit inside this image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO):
The blast hurled a CME into space, but the cloud does not appear to be heading for Earth.
A movie of the event, prepared by Steele Hill of the Goddard Space Flight Center, shows magnetic fields in concerted motion across an expanse of solar “terrain” more than 700,000 km wide. Observations by SDO have shown that such wide-ranging eruptions are not uncommon on the sun–the great Global Eruption of August 2010 being the iconic example.Solar flare alerts:
CHANCE OF FLARES: NOAA forecasters estimate a 25% chance of M-class solar flares and a 5% chance of X-flares today. The most likely sources would be sunspots AR1610 and AR1614, which have unstable ‘beta-gamma’ magnetic fields. Eruptions from AR1614 would likely be Earth-directed. Solar flare alerts:
The Sun erupted with two prominence eruptions, one after the other over a four-hour period on Nov. 16, 2012, between the hours of 1 and 5 a.m. EST. The red-glowing looped material is plasma, a hot gas made of electrically charged hydrogen and helium. The prominence plasma flows along a tangled and twisted structure of magnetic fields generated by the sun’s internal dynamo. An erupting prominence occurs when such a structure becomes unstable and bursts outward, releasing the plasma.
The Sun erupted with two prominence eruptions, one after the other over a four-hour period on Nov. 16, 2012, between the hours of 1 and 5 a.m. EST. The red-glowing looped material is plasma, a hot gas made of electrically charged hydrogen and helium. The prominence plasma flows along a tangled and twisted structure of magnetic fields generated by the sun’s internal dynamo. An erupting prominence occurs when such a structure becomes unstable and bursts outward, releasing the plasma.
The action was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) in the 304 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light. The expanding particle clouds heading into space do not appear to be Earth-directed.
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