Solar Flares

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A wave of bright light encircles the sun and like a spark to a match, solar flares make the already bright sun a bit brighter. Intense levels of energy waves and particles are spewed into space eventually arriving to earth within an hour. Since the radiation ejected varies from the entire spectrum they disrupt many forms of communications using satellites like GPS and cellphones, and also radio waves. According to howstuffworks.com the ionized particles overcharge power grids and can cause blackouts. This gives way to the extreme possibility that if a gigantic solar flare ever hit earth we might lose our beloved electronics and decline in progression. On the Brightside however, small flares headed earth’s way interact with its magnetic field creating colorful auroras at the poles.

Solar flares are defined as bright flashes of light upon the sun’s surface. They release energy in the billions according to Wikipedia the equivalent of 160,000,000,000 megatons of TNT. To understand solar flares we must know about sunspots or the sun in general. Simply put the sun is a huge ball of plasma. The 3 states of matter that everyone knows about are gas, solid and liquid while plasma; hot ionized gas is the 4th. Heat will naturally expand and so will the sun when immense heat is produced from high pressures allowing nuclear fusion. It expands until a point where the gravitational forces from the dense star pulls it back and it becomes a stable ball of light.

Upon the bright star sunspots are dark black spots in comparison to other hot areas. They are cooler as a result of messy behavior between the sun’s gravity and its magnetic field. Howstuffworks.com has this to say

“The hot gas trapped beneath sunspots exerts pressure on the magnetic field lines that prevents the gas from reaching the surface. This winds the magnetic field lines into tighter coils. Sometimes, even more field lines become entangled. Once in a while, the magnetic field lines will uncoil without much incident and the sunspot fades as the hot gases rise to the surface. But sometimes the pressure continues to build until the magnetic field lines snap out suddenly, causing a solar flare.”

Earth and its humans are protected from threatening radiation of coronal mass ejections but astronauts or humans outside of the atmosphere at a risk of being bombarded by unseen enemy. This becomes a topic of discussion for future Mars expeditions. In fact, earth has been hit by a solar flare in history and that was in 1859. It slightly damaged the technology of that time but the geomagnetic storm resulted in aurorae that could not only from the poles but worldwide. It is said a solar flare of a similar magnitude was enroute to earth in 2012, causing the hype of the apocalypse, but it barely missed.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/sun5.htm

http://science.howstuffworks.com/solar-flare-electronics.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot