Solar Flare, Strongest Of 2013, Blamed For Hour-Long Radio Blackout
By: Tariq Malik
Published: 05/13/2013 06:54 AM EDT on SPACE.com
The sun unleashed a colossal Mother's Day solar flare on Sunday (May 12) in what has become the most powerful solar eruption of the year.
The giant solar flare, which registered as one of the largest eruptions the sun can unleash, peaked Sunday night at 10:17 p.m. EDT (0217 GMT) and was captured on camera by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. It sparked an hour-long high-frequency radio blackout, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Sunday's solar flare registered as an X1.7-class sun eruption the strongest type of solar flare the sun can fire off, according to the SWPC officials. [Most Powerful Solar Storms of 2013 (Photos)]
When aimed directly at Earth, X-class solar flares can pose a risk to astronauts and satellites in orbit, as well as interfere with communications and GPS signals on the ground. They can also super-charge Earth's northern lights displays by bombarding the planet with solar particles, triggering awesome aurora light shows.
But Sunday's solar flare erupted from an active sunspot on the far side of the sun, so it was not directly facing Earth when it unleashed a wave of super-hot plasma called a coronal mass ejection (CME).
"No planets were in the line of fire," astronomer Tony Phillips wrote on his website Spaceweather.com, which tracks space weather and skywatching events. "The sunspot that produced this blast is on the far side of the sun. Soon, in a few days, it will turn toward Earth, emerging into view over the sun's eastern limb."
Phillips wrote that NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope and Deep Impact/Epoxi spacecraft may be in the line of fire of the solar flare. The flare came from a sunspot that has been active over the last week, firing off a number of medium-strength M-class solar flares as it slowly rotates into view as seen from Earth.
Sunday's sun eruption was by far the strongest solar flare of 2013 as the sun heads toward the peak o fits 11-year weather cycle later this year. Until Sunday, every solar flare this year have been M-class solar flares or weaker. An M6.5 flare was the strongest of the year before Sunday's event.
In 2012, the sun fired off a series of X-class flares, including a colossal X5.4 solar flare. An X6.9 solar flare in 2011 marked the solar storm in five years at that time.
The sun is currently in an active phase of its space weather cycle. The current cycle, called Solar Cycle 24, began in 2008 and is expected to run through 2019-2020. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is one of several spacecraft keeping constant watch on the sun to monitor its solar activity through this active phase of Solar Cycle 24.
SPACE.com will provide updates on this powerful solar flare as new details are available today.
, but i still love space and watching the night sky.
Sun fires off fourth major solar flare of the week--more expected
By Deborah Netburn
May 15, 2013, 5:03 a.m.
There she goes again!
The same region of the sun that brought you three powerful solar flares in a 24-hour span from Sunday night to Monday evening let loose Tuesday night with another explosive flash of ultraviolet radiation and sent tons of its own solar material flying through space.
The flare, which peaked at 6:48 p.m. EDT, was the fourth this week to be categorized as X-class, the most powerful type of solar flare.
As usual, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught beautiful images of the sun's fireworks, which you can see above. (The flare is the area of bright white at the far left of the image).
Like its three predecessors, this solar flare was associated with a coronal mass ejection -- a mixture of plasma and other solar material released by the sun at the time of a solar flare. A report on SpaceWeather.com noted that although the sunspot from which the coronal mass ejection originated is not facing Earth directly, it is possible that part of it may be headed toward our planet.
When a coronal mass ejection hits Earth, it interacts with the planet's magnetic field, occasionally causing radio blackouts and, in extreme cases, disrupting power. It can also interfere with satellites and create beautiful, dynamic auroras.
Scientists have dubbed the active region of the sun that is creating these solar flares AR 11748. They still don't know much about this region or exactly why it is so active because it has just started to rotate into view from Earth.
"It's been hard to see completely because it was around the corner," Alex Young, a heliophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center, told The Times on Tuesday afternoon. "We can see it is complicated, but it is hard to get a good picture -- we will have to wait till it rotates around."
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters say there's a good chance that more solar flares are on their way. The agency says there is a 50% chance of X-class solar flares and an 80% chance of less powerful M-class solar flares, in the next 24 hours.
Scientists Shape First Global Topographic Map of Saturn's Moon Titan
May 15, 2013 Scientists have created the first global topographic map of Saturn's moon Titan, giving researchers a valuable tool for learning more about one of the most Earthlike and interesting worlds in the solar system.
Titan is Saturn's largest moon -- at 1,600 miles (2,574 kilometers) across it's bigger than planet Mercury -- and is the second-largest in the solar system. Scientists care about Titan because it's the only moon in the solar system known to have clouds, surface liquids and a mysterious, thick atmosphere. The cold atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earth's, but methane on Titan acts the way water vapor does on Earth, forming clouds and falling as rain and carving the surface with rivers. Organic chemicals, derived from methane, are present in Titan's atmosphere, lakes and rivers and may offer clues about the origins of life.
"Titan has so much interesting activity -- like flowing liquids and moving sand dunes -- but to understand these processes it's useful to know how the terrain slopes," says Ralph Lorenz, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., who led the map-design team. "It's especially helpful to those studying hydrology and modeling Titan's climate and weather, who need to know whether there is high ground or low ground driving their models."
Titan's thick haze scatters light in ways that make it very hard for remote cameras to "see" landscape shapes and shadows, the usual approach to measuring topography on planetary bodies. Virtually all the data we have on Titan comes from NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft, which has flown past the moon nearly 100 times over the past decade. On many of those flybys, Cassini has used a radar imager, which can peer through the haze, and the radar data can be used to estimate the surface height.
"With this new topographic map, one of the most fascinating and dynamic worlds in our solar system now pops out in 3-D," says Steve Wall, the deputy lead of Cassini's radar team, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "On Earth, rivers, volcanoes, and even weather are closely related to heights of surfaces -- we're now eager to see what we can learn from them on Titan."
There are challenges, however. "Cassini isn't orbiting Titan," Lorenz says. "We have only imaged about half of Titan's surface, and multiple 'looks' or special observations are needed to estimate the surface heights. If you divided Titan into 1-degree by 1-degree [latitude and longitude] squares, only 11 percent of those squares have topography data in them."
Lorenz's team used a mathematical process called splining -- effectively using smooth curved surfaces to "join" the areas between grids of existing data. "You can take a spot where there is no data, look how close it is to the nearest data, and use various approaches of averaging and estimating to calculate your best guess," he says. "If you pick a point, and all the nearby points are high altitude, you'd need a special reason for thinking that point would be lower. We're mathematically papering over the gaps in our coverage."
The estimations fit with current knowledge of the moon -- that its polar regions are "lower" than areas around the equator, for example -- but connecting those points allows scientists to add new layers to their studies of Titan's surface, especially those modeling how and where Titan's rivers flow, and the seasonal distribution of its methane rainfall. "The movement of sands and the flow of liquids are influenced by slopes, and mountains can trigger cloud formation and therefore rainfall. This global product now gives modelers a convenient description of this key factor in Titan's dynamic climate system," Lorenz says.
The most recent data used to compile the map is from 2012; Lorenz says it could be worth revising when the Cassini mission ends in 2017, when more data will have accumulated, filling some of the gaps in present coverage. "We felt we couldn't wait and should release an interim product," he says. "The community has been hoping to get this for a while. I think it will stimulate a lot of interesting work."
The map, as well as a paper on the project ("A Global Topography Map of Titan"), appear in the journal Icarus (see link to abstract below).
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and ASI, the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the US and several European countries.
