>NASA alert warns huge solar flare will make 'direct hit' with Earth this weekend
>A major solar flare that erupted from the Sun on Thursday, October 28, will batter the Earth over the weekend. The flare, which experts at NASA have dubbed as a "significant solar flare", has fired off the Sun in one of the strongest storms of the current weather cycle.
>Solar flares are divided into categories according to their strength and the one that was fired off yesterday was an X1-class solar flare predicted to enter the atmosphere on Saturday or Sunday, causing widespread power outages and communication failures. It has already caused a temporary, but strong, radio blackout in parts of South America, according to the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC).
>The one currently headed towards Earth is an X1 flare which despite being the least intense of the X-class flares is likely wreak havoc by interfering with radio and satellite communications.
Are solar flares visible? I thought they just wiped out all technology worldwide and sent us back to the Stone Age. And that's unlikely to happen, or the news would be shouting about it more. So it's just a question of whether I'll see it and whether my telly will go off. It's likely to be cloudy over the weekend, so I assume there will be no exciting armageddons (armagedda?) this Sunday.
I remember seeing a list of "things that can destroy the world that nobody is talking about", probably around 2014, and I remember thinking a pandemic sounded really boring and I hoped we got a solar flare or the Yellowstone volcano instead. I was right about the pandemic; it was dull as shit. So fingers crossed it's the end of technology instead.
>>35744 There's a whole hysterical panic from the usual folk that the Earth's magnetic field is low at the moment but really, the 1989 storm was an X15. This is X1.
>>35745 The aurora borealis is visible. Although since 1989 the threat was obvious and been largely addressed.
>And that's unlikely to happen, or the news would be shouting about it more.
You'd think the BBC would at least have it as their lead story on the science page. That should be a worrying sign in itself.
Not without a solar telescope. The Aurora Borealis are caused by charged particles from solar wind interacting with the ionosphere.
The Mirror are hyping this up out of all proportion. There was a moderately large coronal mass ejection yesterday, but nobody will notice other than seafarers, pilots, astronomers and radio nerds. There might be minor disruption to some niche communications systems for a few hours or days, but it won't affect your mobile phone or anything like that. Anyone who relies on the HF systems that are affected by solar flares is trained to deal with them, because they're a frequent occurrence.
Solar weather operates on an 11 year cycle of activity and we're currently at the quietest part of that cycle. This X1 flare is of interest to those handful of people it does affect because it suggests that solar activity might be picking up, but it's completely irrelevant to 99.999% of people. We had a number of flares 10 to 30 times larger than this one during the peak of the solar cycle between 2000 and 2003.
>>35745 >I thought they just wiped out all technology worldwide
>>35747 >Anyone who relies on the HF systems that are affected by solar flares is trained to deal with them, because they're a frequent occurrence.
All of this. Those of us who are also secretly radio nerds like solar flares because it enhances propagation - I'll be able to communicate with countries I usually can't reach.
