Comments on: Incredible solar flare video

By: NASA films incredible solar flare: Video of unique sun explosion | Uses of Solar Power

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:47:11 +0000

[...] by Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.Duration : 0:0:35[youtube rrBl5f08rhw] Courtesy: NASA/SDO/GOES An unusual solar flare observed by a NASA space observatory on Tuesday could… unleashed a firestorm of radiation on a level not witnessed since 2006, and will likely lead to [...]

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 15:15:17 +0000

@^ Ben : No worries – my pleasure.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:08:01 +0000

@ Messier Tidy Upper

Hey thanks for the links, I’ll get into these tonight. I’m still kinda new at the astronomy thing….so many questions.

By: Neal

Neal — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:31:51 +0000

Yes! The sun puts out 4E26 W, so every second it has to lose 4 billion kg = 4 million tons. Since the mass loss H to He is about 2%, as I recall, the sun must be fusing about 200 billion kg every second.

No worries, though, 4 billion kg is only about 0.0000000000000000002 % of the sun’s mass. To lose all 2E30 kg of its mass, the sun would have to continuously put out 4E26 W for another 20 trillion years.

By: Tom (H. Type)

Tom (H. Type) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 19:27:20 +0000

This is really incredible.
Is it true that the sun converts 5 MILLION tons of hydrogen to energy every second…really!
Staggering…

By: Keith Bowden

Keith Bowden — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 18:36:05 +0000

@Thameron
What “wild… exclamations”? “Incredible Solar Flare Video”. Oh, yeah, I’m scared. Or maybe not. I for one welcome our new video overlords.

Seriously, wtf?

By: TechyDad

TechyDad — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 16:58:31 +0000

@Jeffersonian ,

Using gogblog’s photo of the flare and the Earth and using the super-scientific method known as “putting my finger up to the screen and estimating size” I get about 16 Earths tall. Of course, the photo comparing it with the Earth cuts off some of the flare, so probably 20 or so Earths tall. And, as Phil said, that’s not even the biggest the Sun is capable of!

By: Neal

Neal — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 14:06:41 +0000

Plasma’s non-local behavior never fails to boggle my mind. At the end, it looks like the Sun is just slurping that prominence back up.

By: Murff

Murff — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:26:34 +0000

Wish it had sound

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 06:11:55 +0000

@ ^ Thameron : Oh come on. Given Phil’s record in debunking such scares & taking the calmest, most rational & reasonable approach to things, I think that last part is going a bit far. I really don’t think the BA was trying to ramp this up into any sort of “OMG! The sky’s falling! We’re Doooomed!!1!” type thing at all.

I think he was just marvelling at some awe-inspiring video of an astronomically spectacular event and conveying that sense of the wonderful (& mega-scale) to us.