b. Every so often, the Sun produces massive solar flares that could have an effe
ID: 153224 • Letter: B
Question
b. Every so often, the Sun produces massive solar flares that could have an effect on Earth. We are not going to cover this type of an event in this course, nevertheless it is something to be aware of. Answer the following questions concerning such events.
i. What would the effect on humans be if a massive solar flare were to hit Earth? (1 point)
ii. Has such an event happened within human history and what effects did it have on humans? Explain (1 point)
iii. What could we as humans do to avoid the effects of such an event? (1 point)
iv. Have there been any close calls for such in an event within the past 10 years? Explain (1 point)
Explanation / Answer
i. Solar-flare explosions can produced clouds of charged particles that have crashed into Earth's magnetic field, causing the field to waver in what researchers call a "geomagnetic storm" and it can result to wiping out of our technology and leaving the planet dark.
ii. The largest solar flare to reach Earth was back in 1859 on 1st september. The white-light solar flare, was a magnetic explosion on the sun's surface. It was so powerful that it briefly outshone the sun and, within a few hours, caused brilliant red, green and purple lights in the sky to erupt all over Earth (such light shows are colorful and common side effects of solar flares with coronal mass ejections).
It also supercharged telegraph cables that shocked operators, set telegraph paper afire and, in some cases, transmitted messages even when the lines were disconnected from their batteries.
In February 2011, a small scale solar storm interrupted GPS signals for several minutes, which could potentially have spelled disaster for commercial airplanes or ships relying on GPS guidance systems to land or dock during that time.
iii. One cannot avoid such event. Only the possible way is to avoid the he potential consequences of a large-scale solar flare hitting Earth by scrambling to develop new solar flare detection methods.
iv. On September 6th, 2017 the sun released two powerful solar flares — the second was the most powerful in more than a decade. At 5:10 a.m. EDT (0910 GMT), an X-class solar flare — the most powerful sun-storm category — blasted from a large sunspot on the sun's surface. That flare was the strongest since 2015, at X2.2, but it was dwarfed just 3 hours later, at 8:02 a.m. EDT (1202 GMT), by an X9.3 flare, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC).
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