What causes, or what’s happening at sun spots? (Find an image to include, or a short video, copy in the url.)
Geomagnetic energy was so abundant that telegraph operators were able to send messages without being plugged into their batteries. What year was this event recorded, and what did they call it?
What is the aurora? What causes it (or how does it exist), and what is it good for?
How many “solar super storms” have occurred in the last 150 years?
Responses
When geomagnetic fields converge into a single space on the sun, we’ll see a sunspot. Sometimes those magnetic field lines can get wrapped around each other and twisted, and sometimes they’ll snap and break into a smooth configuration. When that happens we see a solar flare.
In 1859, there was a geomagnetic storm called, “The Carrington Event”. There were telegraph operators that reported being able to send messages through their systems by using the electric current generated by the geomagnetic storm, without needing to be plugged into their batteries.
When charged particles from the sun strike air molecules in Earth’s magnetic field, they cause those molecules’ atoms to become excited. The molecules give off light as they calm down.
When a solar storm occurs, solar mass is ejected from the sun and heads towards us. When that solar mass reaches our magnetic field, we see the evidence as an aurora.
Auroras are caused by the mass of hot plasma raining down on Earth from the sun, bumping electrons off the gas in the atmosphere of the magnetic field, and when those electrons come back together with their atoms, light is released.
During the Carrington Event, in 1859, people reported seeing auroras as far south as Columbia (northwestern South America) and Hawaii. Typically, the best places we can observe auroras are Fairbanks, Alaska, Yellowknife, Canada, Tromsø, Norway, Northern Sweden and Finland, Greenland, Tasmania, and New Zealand.
Since we started recording in the year 1755, there have been 10 solar events of this magnitude. The cycle of when these solar events are more likely to occur seems to be about every eleven years.
And since about every eleven years is when activity peaks, 2025 could prove interesting.
