Sun facts

[simple_gifts]

Originally Posted By: 4wheeldog
Originally Posted By: simple_gifts
Good to see someone take up an interest in astronomy later in life.

Quote:

A huge solar flare has the POTENTIAL to bring down power systems and communications, but it would have to be much larger than anything in recorded history.


Communications systems have already been disrupted and damage occurred in the past by solar storms.


Yes they were. But.....Did it take us ten years to get back up and running? I think not....


I don't understand your point. If you use the analogy of earthquakes, it took a giant one in SF to level the city + another 60 years for society to develop engineered solutions to cope with the situation. Do we want similar lesson WRT the electric grid?

These solar storms, do we know the magnitude? Are we sure one, 10% bigger might not cause 10x the damage? Ten percent (or even 2%) on a solar magnitude is a huge amount of energy.

We only have had an electric grid ~100 years; nanoseconds on the life of the sun.

 

[FL_Rob]

We just don't know.I can reason that there is no "edge", only that detectable/visible matter hasn't fully expanded yet to a point that we can set a definition of "edge".Most of these newer science shows are getting too speculative on these ideas, imo.

 

[Astro14]

Originally Posted By: simple_gifts
Good to see someone take up an interest in astronomy later in life.

Quote:

A huge solar flare has the POTENTIAL to bring down power systems and communications, but it would have to be much larger than anything in recorded history.


Communications systems have already been disrupted and damage occurred in the past by solar storms.


Space weather is interesting. My senior seminar in astrophysics was solar physics.

A truly large CME impacting Earth could, like an EMP, create a field strong enough to fry every electric line, every wire pathway aligned with the field, which would include every integrated circuit, every electric device.

It is a catastrophic scenario...everyone without power. Every car dead because its computer is fried. No cell phones. No phone lines. No water or gas because the utility companies got zapped, too. Your backup generator might work, or it might be fried. But either way, it will run out of fuel and all the pumps are dead. So are the trucks that bring more fuel. So are the refineries that make the fuel.

Everything that runs on electricity stops working...permanently.

Everything would have to be rebuilt/repaired in a region that wasn't zapped. A decade seems wildly optimistic.

Good thing it's unlikely!

 

[Astro14]

Originally Posted By: FL_Rob
We just don't know.I can reason that there is no "edge", only that detectable/visible matter hasn't fully expanded yet to a point that we can set a definition of "edge".Most of these newer science shows are getting too speculative on these ideas, imo.


It's not that simple.

Cosmology is not intuitive.

 

[FL_Rob]

Originally Posted By: Astro14
Originally Posted By: FL_Rob
We just don't know.I can reason that there is no "edge", only that detectable/visible matter hasn't fully expanded yet to a point that we can set a definition of "edge".Most of these newer science shows are getting too speculative on these ideas, imo.


It's not that simple.

Cosmology is not intuitive.


To which part are you referring? That the detectable universe is (as of yet) impossible to define...or that some science shows rely too heavily on guesswork.In my opinion,the term "theory" has been watered down to include anything that remotely, may be possible.....someday.