Two new solar flares occurred on the evening of September 7. Scientists frighten: our star can blaze hundreds of times more powerful than the day before
The "attack" dragged on
The sun continues to rage. On September 6, 2017, it flashed with two powerful flares - first class X2.2, then - X 9.3. September 7 was followed by two more - one weaker flash of class M 7.3, the other very strong - class X 1.3. The source of flares is the same spot. It is also the active region AR 2673, which began to "spark" on September 4.
The increased activity of the star, which is at the minimum of its activity, puzzles scientists. What will happen when the Sun is at its maximum ?!
The flares that occurred on the Sun on September 6 and 7, 2017, disrupted radio communications around the world. The accompanying coronal ejections will create a magnetic storm that will lead to power surges and breakdowns in power grids. Some citizens will "knock out" the fuses. And in meteorological people, moreover, their heads will start to ache, their hearts beat faster, and their blood pressure goes off scale.
In the classification of solar flares, class X is the most powerful. Therefore, those three that just happened were by no means ordinary. But not the most powerful - our luminary is capable of more. In the rating that heliophysicists have been conducting since 1976, the X 9.3 flare is three times less powerful than the record so far out of the number of reliably recorded flares - X28, which blazed in November 2003.
The flashes are aimed exactly at the Earth.
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It used to be worse
Heliophysicists find it difficult to accurately classify the historical outbreak that occurred in the fall of 1859 and was called the Carrington event. But somewhere in the X100 it could apply.
The young English astronomer Richard Carrington was the first to notice unusually large sunspots, which, as a result, gave rise to a powerful flare. 17 hours after it blazed, night over many parts of the planet turned into day - so light became from the green and crimson flashes of the northern lights. The telegraph went out. Sparks poured from the apparatus, stinging telegraph operators and setting fire to paper.
Experts from NASA and the American Academy of Sciences, since 2012, have regularly predicted an outbreak of the Carrington scale. And even more powerful. They are waiting for her. According to their estimates, such a flash will induce a constant current of such strength in the Earth's electromagnetic field that it literally burns electrical networks. First of all - transformer substations. And the planet will plunge into darkness.
“In the century before last, mankind was just lucky that it did not reach a high technological level,” says James L. Green, one of the directors of NASA and a specialist in the magnetosphere. - Now, after such an outbreak, it will take at least 10 years to restore the destroyed world infrastructure. And trillions of dollars.
Only the Carrington event is not the limit. A group of Japanese scientists from Nagoya University, led by Professor Fusa Miyake, studied sections of ancient cedars and oaks that grew in Europe. And I discovered that in the Middle Ages, trees were subjected to a powerful energy impact. As a result, the content of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in wood has increased 20 times.
From the annual rings, the Japanese determined that the burst of radiation occurred in 775. Its source was an X-ray super-flare on the Sun. Its power was 20 times higher than that which burned telegraphs. That is, a medieval outbreak could be classified as X2000.
And it will be really bad
Darkness on Earth is not the end of the world. This ancient X2000 outbreak, if it happens now, the electricity will certainly shut down. But it won't kill people.
“The destructive power of the flash grows with its power,” scientists frighten. And the filmmakers colorfully illustrate their threats. For example, the ending of the sci-fi film Knowing does not leave the inhabitants of the Earth any chance: the monstrous cataclysm on the Sun literally burns out all living things. A similar nightmare, it turns out, is not excluded in reality.
Our galaxy has examples of catastrophes caused by starbursts.
The Swift Mission spacecraft recorded a flare and coronal ejection that occurred on a star located 60 light years from Earth in the DG Canum Venaticorum (DG CVn) system. The expelled material was heated to 200 million degrees Celsius. And the flare itself was 10 thousand times (!) - more powerful than the strongest flare ever observed on the Sun. And it was not some giant that blazed like that, but a red dwarf - a star whose size is much smaller than that of the sun. If aliens lived with this star, then they had the end of the world. As in The Sign.
- The flash that happened in the DG CVn system could be assigned the index X100000, says Stephen Drake, astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
According to the scientist, the discovery testifies: from time to time in our galaxy there are so-called mega-flares carrying the apocalypse. The sun and we together with it from such cataclysms are also not immune.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY