As far as power grid surges blowing out the stuff in your house, I don’t think a Faraday cage would help, since the power surge would be coming in on your main power feed over the wires. You could put a 1-1 transformer on each lead, which would pass 110/220 AC while blocking DC power surges, but it would cost something in efficiency. (No idea how much, but my WAG would be 10-20%.)

If this is not accurate, please someone correct me.

I know they can overload and blow out power grids, what can they do to my home appliances and computers and would a Faraday cage protect them?

@Chip: I don’t think the video is in real time, as you can clearly see the sun rotate even in the space of one second. I don’t know how fast the sun spins on its axis, but I don’t think it’s *that* fast.

As an example of what folks do, see “DISENTANGLING THE MAGNETIC FIELD STRUCTURE OF SUNSPOTS”:

http://zeus.nascom.nasa.gov/~dmueller/pub/Mueller2006_SO2.pdf

I don’t know if scientists know exactly what causes it, but I do know that the overall magnetic field of the sun flips every 11 years. Of course, with how complex the suns magnetic field is, I’m not sure how you’d be able to tell. Earth has two poles. The sun has hundreds due to the hot gasses flooding back and forth. I guess, overall they add up to make a big one. I guess we need an astronomer to tell us…

I haven’t read the book yet. On my to do list. I guess there is a chapter on the Carrington event? That’s one of my favorite unused disaster motifs for stories. I’m going to do a Carrington event story sometime.

you can see that as the intense flash of light coming from the bright region in the center of the video.

There’s an intense flash of light somewhere in this video?

Even after going through it half a dozen times, I can see no such thing. There’s a rather unremarkable event where the bright dot gets slightly larger for a moment. It’s so unremarkable I was only able to see it about every third attempt.

This explosive event also launched a streamer of plasma off the Sun’s surface, flowing outward along the Sun’s magnetic field.

I can just about make that one out. Again it’s rather hard to see, in this case mainly because it’s MUCH too fast.

Umm … if I interpret the markings of that video correctly, YouTube thinks it’s one second long. That feels just about right.

Whoever created that: what on earth were they thinking? Could it possibly be any crappier and harder to make out anything in it?

Note that Alex Filippenko and Kim Weaver will be among the “panelists providing analysis of the research”. Their particular *specialties* might help narrow the possibilities somewhat (likely not an object in our Milky Way galaxy).