The White House has released its Presidential budget request for fiscal year 2013 today, including the budget for NASA, and as usual there is some good news and some bad. But the good news is tepid, and the bad news is, well, pretty damn bad. I can lay some of this blame at NASA’s feet — a long history of being over budget and behind schedule looms large — but also at the President himself. Cutting NASA’s budget at all is, simply, dumb. I know we’re in an economic crisis (though there are indications it’s getting better), but there are hugely larger targets than NASA. If this budget goes through Congress as is, it will mean the end of a lot of NASA projects and future missions.

The budget

The President’s FY13 budget for NASA is $17.7 billion in total. This is marginally less than last year. In most cases, the budget for science is stable, with a lot of missions getting modest increases. After perusing the individual budgets, it looks to me that most missions that are getting reductions are either ones that have been up a while and are winding down, ones near launch that are built and ready to go and therefore costs are smaller than during development, or ones that have had launch delays (due to tech issues with the launch systems).

Overall, astrophysics, Earth science, and Heliophysics (Sun studies) did OK. Again, some individual missions got increases and some decreases, but in general the budgets are stable. Funding for commercial spaceflight got a massive increase, more than doubling last year’s $400M budget. I’m all for that, as of course is the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. I’ve been vocal about that, and I think handing off launch and other capabilities to commercial ventures is a good way for NASA to save money in the long run.

Some cuts didn’t make sense to me. Education, for example, drops from $136M to $100M. Why? That money funds a vast amount of educational outreach — and I should know; I was funded by this for several years when I was at Sonoma State University creating educational materials for various NASA satellites. That funding does a huge amount of good for schoolkids, and cutting it is a mistake.

And it gets worse. A lot worse.

The bad news for Mars

However, planetary exploration has gotten creamed. Its budget overall drops from $1.5 billion to $1.2, a very deep cut that doesn’t just threaten but destroys near-future Mars exploration as well as future big grand missions to the outer planets in the tradition of Voyager, Cassini, and others.

There’s no easy way to say this: these cuts are devastating. The President’s request for just Mars exploration is $361 million, a crippling $226M drop in funding over the FY12 estimate, a 38.5% cut.

Read that again: a 38.5% cut. This will effectively halt the new exploration of Mars. It means pulling out of planning the ExoMars mission with the European Space Agency — effectively cancelling the mission, which will not make the Europeans happy — and also halting planning on a 2016 mission. There is still funding for the MAVEN mission scheduled for launch next year, but at reduced levels.

In my opinion, part of this is the fault of NASA: Curiosity, the rover on its way to Mars right now, was well over budget. Even after all these years, NASA still has a hard time getting budgets right, which is frustrating. However, this particular cut in the budget is madness. It was fought mightily by NASA, but the Office of Management and Budget apparently ignored all the advice from scientists and managers at NASA, cutting the program anyway. Ed Weiler, who was the head of the NASA Science Mission directorate, quit in protest over these cuts. I’ve had my disagreements with Ed on budget specifics over the years, but he has been a big defender of NASA from government cuts. For him to quit over this is a pretty strong indicator of how bad it is. Read that link to get all the details; but it’s not a happy story.

Bill Nye, speaking on behalf of The Planetary Society, says it best:

The priorities reflected in this budget would take us down the wrong path. Science is the part of NASA that’s actually conducting interesting and scientifically important missions. Spacecraft sent to Mars, Saturn, Mercury, the Moon, comets, and asteroids have been making incredible discoveries, with more to come from recent launches to Jupiter, the Moon, and Mars. The country needs more of these robotic space exploration missions, not less.

He’s right. The US has had an incredibly strong Mars program which has returned amazing science, as well as garnered enthusiastic public support. No other country has been able to do as well getting to Mars as we have. Of all the pieces of NASA to cut, this should be the very last one to see a reduction! It’s maddening, bizarre, and simply dumb.

What cost JWST and Curiosity?

NASA chief Charles Bolden tried to spin all this positively, but I have a hard time seeing it that way. And it’s hard to see how James Webb Space Telescope did not have an impact here. JWST is getting a large $109M (21%) increase as it gets nearer to completion. My thoughts on this are on record, for example here, here, and here. Basically, this mission is taking the lion’s share of NASA’s science funding, and if NASA’s overall budget remains stable JWST must perforce siphon money from other missions. Administrator Bolden wouldn’t specify what part of the budget would get cut to accommodate JWST, but given the massive slashing of Mars funding, well. That seems clear enough.

At some level the Mars rover Curiosity, currently on its way to Mars, must have played a role here too. It was also overbudget, though by a smaller total amount than JWST. But its impact has been significant.

I’ll note that I think JWST is far enough along to make sure it gets finished and launched, but the funding for it should be added to NASA’s budget, not subtracted from other places. I’m not happy with the way JWST was handled (the amount it’s over budget is staggering to say the least) and NASA really needs to gets its head in the game when it comes to figuring this stuff out.

But the thing is, we shouldn’t even have to make these choices. We shouldn’t have to choose between one ground-breaking scientific mission and another. The reason we do is because NASA’s budget is so small in the first place. It really speaks volumes about where science and explorations stand as an American value.

The next step

Mind you, this budget is not set in stone. This is simply the President’s request, which then goes to Congress. Over the past few years, Obama’s request has been for increases, with Congress threatening to cut it. Now, however, this budget comes pre-cut to Congress. The news isn’t all bad, though: some members of Congress have said this budget is not satisfactory (like Adam Schiff (D-Pasadena), whose district includes JPL), and will fight to make it better. The Planetary Society will be rallying its members to talk to their Congress critters and increase NASA’s slice for science from 27.5% to a solid 30%, enough to re-fund Mars exploration.

My opinion hasn’t really changed in years. NASA is a tiny, tiny part of the federal budget, far less than 1%. There are other places where money can be found, other places where cuts make more sense.

I’ve made this analogy before: if you have a hard drive full of 4 Gb movie files, you don’t make room by deleting 100kB text files! You go after the big targets, which is far more efficient. Reducing NASA’s budget for Mars exploration frees up 0.01% of the federal budget. That’s it. One ten-thousandth of what we spend overall, a hundredth of a penny for every dollar.

What does that mean in more understandable terms? Over the past few years, the rate of money spent in Afghanistan and Iraq is about 20 million dollars per hour. In other words, the amount of money being cut from Mars exploration is equal to what we were spending on the War on Terror in just 15 hours.

You might want to read that again. For the cost of less than a single day on the War on Terror, we could have a robust and far-reaching program to explore Mars, look for signs of life on another planet, increase our overall science knowledge, and inspire a future generation of kids.

Our priorities on national spending could use some major overhauling. Science is the future. Our economy depends on many things, but science, engineering, and technology represent a huge portion of its support.

It’s simple: cutting back on science is cutting our future’s throat. And this budget is reaching for the knife.

So I’m reaching for my keyboard. I’ll be contacting my Senators and Representative. If you’re an American citizen, I suggest you do the same.

I’ve been doing this astronomy thing for a while, OK? I’ve seen galaxies, clusters, stars, planets… so many I’ve lost count. So it’s hard to find something I’ve never seen before, or even heard of before. So when astrophotographer Adam Block sent me a note about the nebula Abell 31, my first reaction was, "Say what now?", and then I clicked on the picture, and my second reaction was "What the what?" Then my third reaction was to soak in the beauty of this gorgeous object, and my fourth reaction was to nod my head slowly, thinking, "Ahh, I see what’s going on here."

Let me share:

See what I mean? What a beauty! [Click to ennebulenate.]

This image was taken with a 0.9 meter telescope at Mt. Lemmon in Arizona, and is the result of an astonishing 21 hours of exposure time in various filters! Right away, that was a clue as to why I had never heard of this object: it’s incredibly faint. A quick perusal of amateur astronomers’ sites proved that to be correct; not too many have observed this jewel because it’s barely detectable.

Abell 31 is a planetary nebula, a cloud of gas formed when a dying star expels winds of matter. At first the wind is slow, but then as the star continues to expire the velocity increases. The faster wind catches up with and slams into the slower wind, forming fantastic shapes, usually displaying amazing symmetry.

Abell 31 isn’t symmetric though! One side is sharply defined, and the other diffuse, fuzzy. I was pretty sure right away what I was seeing: this nebula is in motion, moving through space, and interacting with the thin material between the stars. A literature search confirmed this suspicion: it’s moving through space at relatively high speed. In this picture, the direction of motion is toward the bottom of the frame, and the gas leaving the star in that direction is compressed. Gas heading the other way is moving downwind, and relatively untouched. Think of it like blowing on a dandelion; the side toward your mouth gets compressed, while the other side stays fuzzy.

The red gas is hydrogen, and the blue is oxygen. Interestingly, oxygen is probably located throughout the entire nebula, but only in the center is it close enough to the central star to get lit up and glow. The star doing all the work here is a white dwarf, basically the core of a normal star like the Sun, but exposed after all the outer layers of the star have been shed to form the nebula.

Abell 31′s white dwarf central star is tiny, only about 4 times bigger than Earth (or about 0.04 times the size of the Sun), but it’s incredibly hot, blazing away at about 85,000° Centigrade (150,000°F)! It has about half the mass of the Sun, meaning it probably started out life as a star with twice the mass of our star or so, and lost the rest as it aged and blew those winds. Judging from how fast those winds are blowing outward, the star probably started dying in earnest about 130,000 years ago, after a billion or more years of normal life. What used to be a star a couple of million kilometers across is now this lovely object nearly ten light years wide — that’s 100 trillion kilometers from end to end!

At its distance from the Earth of 2000 light years that makes it pretty big in the sky, roughly half the size of the full Moon. With its light spread out so much, no wonder it’s faint. Too bad: it’s a fascinating object, worthy of study. And it’s also fantastically beautiful, worthy of wider recognition.

And I’d love to see a set of Hubble observations of this! I studied planetaries for several years, and I still sometimes get the desire to poke and prod them again. I’ll just have to wait, I suppose, and be satisfied with images as lovely as this one.

Credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

Today in America is our most revered holiday: the Superbowl. I am not particularly invested in either team — I had to look up who’s playing, to be honest — but there is something about the game I like: science! Yes, science, of which there is plenty to be had during any sporting event. You just have to look for it.

Last year, during the big game, I tweeted a series of science facts relating to football, and, when the game was over, collected them into a blog post.

I thought it would be fun do it again — this time, I’ll use the hashtag #Sciperbowl — but this year, instead of waiting to collect them, I’ll simply update this post as I add them. That way you don’t have to wait until the end of the game to see them all.

So sit back on your recliner, keep one hand in a bag of chips and another on the refresh button. Let’s see how to really enjoy this game! I’ll start the tweets and start updating this post at the start of the game.

First Quarter

1) Realistically, a football is not a ball. It’s more of a prolate spheroid.

2) Football pads work by absorbing impact as well as spreading it out over a larger area.

3) Pads lower the force of impact by lengthening the time of the collision.

4) Pressure = Force/Area, so increasing the area of the impact reduces pressure and therefore injury.

5) Every time a football is thrown, it’s briefly in orbit… but the Earth gets in the way.

Second Quarter

NOTE: The following info uses air (not ground) speed and neglects air resistance. [Note: the math on these next ones can be found online, for example at the CSU San Bernadino website.]

6) To be thrown 100 yards, a football should leave the quarterback’s hand at a 45 degree angle at 70 mph.

7) The ground speed of that throw is about 50 mph.

8) A ball thrown like that will reach a max height of about 80 feet.

9) A 100 yard throw like that will take about 4.5 seconds to go up and come back down.

Halftime

10) Halftime for the Universe was 6.86 billion years ago (+/- .12 billion).

Third Quarter

11) Because the Moon has 1/6 the Earth’s gravity, lunar football would be pretty different.

12) On the Moon, a football thrown at 70 mph would go 600 yards, take 27 seconds, and reach 500 feet high.

13) Throw a lunar football at 28 mph to get it 100 yards downfield. It’ll take 11 seconds & get 80 feet high.

14) All those throws assumed a 45 degree angle. At higher and lower angles, the ball must be thrown faster.

15) Want the ball to go into Earth orbit? You’ll have to throw it at 5 miles per second.

16) In a black hole, it doesn’t matter how hard you throw the ball. It’s not getting out.

Fourth Quarter

17) During a 4 hour game, the Earth rotates 60 degrees.

18) During a 4 hour game, the Earth spins a total of 3200 miles at the latitude of Indianapolis.

19) During a 4 hour game, the Moon travels over 9000 miles around the Earth.

20) During a 4 hour game, the New Horizons Pluto probe travels 130,000 miles farther from the Sun.

21) Since the starting whistle, the Sun’s moved 2 million miles in its orbit around the center of the galaxy.

That’s it! And congrats to whichever team won!

Football picture from Elvert Barnes’ Flick photostream.

Over the years I have pointed out the fallacious arguments of climate change deniers when they attack legitimate climatologists like James Hansen and Michael Mann. This is, of course, like kicking at a bee hive, and whenever I do the comments section of my posts fill with lots of angry buzzing.

But now, for what I think is the first time, I find myself the target of an attack. And I have to admit, I welcome it: it’s a textbook case of denialist sleight of hand, of distraction, distortion, error, and misdirection.

Stick around for all of this. It’ll be… interesting.

Our story so far

OK, first, here’s the scoop: a few days ago, I wrote a blog post taking apart two intellectually bankrupt climate change denial articles, one in the Wall Street Journal, and the other in the UK’s Daily Mail. Both were claiming that global warming appears to have stopped in the past few years, a claim which is trivially easy to show wrong. In fact, I linked to two articles doing just that: one at Skeptical Science, and another I myself wrote. Finding actual scientists destroying that claim is not hard at all; those two links have many more links therein.

In my post about the WSJ and DM, I included a graph. It pretty clearly shows temperatures rising from 1973 to the present. And this is where the fun begins.

That’s the plot. It’s from a recent, independent study done at Berkeley, and represents actual, measured, data. Just to be clear, those points are from weather stations across the globe, and the method used to collect and analyze those measurements is described by the Berkeley team themselves (PDF). With me so far?

Apparently, William Briggs is not with me. He takes very vigorous exception to the graph in an article he wrote which he titled "Bad Astronomer Does Bad Statistics: That Wall Street Journal Editorial." I encourage you to read it, so that you can assure yourself I am not misrepresenting his arguments in any way.

I found out about this article when I saw a tweet by Dr. Briggs himself. My first thought was: Uh oh. I sure hope I didn’t make a math mistake somewhere in my WSJ post! I better read Briggs’ article and see… So I read it.

My next thought after reading his arguments was then: Ho-hum. So?

The mismeasure of an argument

Basically, Briggs accuses me of not understanding statistics, of not including error bars, of misrepresenting that points in that plot, of not displaying the plot correctly, and so on ad nauseum. His biggest claim: that those points aren’t measurements at all, but estimates.

Here’s the thing: he’s wrong. Those point are in fact measurements, though they are not raw measurements right off the thermometers. They have been processed, averaged, in a scientifically rigorous way to make sure that the statistics derived from them are in fact solid. The Berkeley team describes in detail how that was done (PDF), and does actually call them estimates, but not because they are just guessing, or using some arcane computer model. They are technically estimates, in the sense that any measurement is an estimate, but they are really, really good ones. Greg Laden tears this use of words apart, as well as pretty much everything else Briggs wrote.

Oddly, Briggs then goes on to call them "predictions" for some reason, and that they came from "models", which is just weird. It’s as if he’s trying to use a word choice that raises doubt about the measurements. But again he’s wrong. They really are measurements, not model predictions. At Open Mind, Brigg’s word choice once again is ripped apart. [Note: Briggs has left a comment there, further verifying the fact that his use of words is incorrect.]

This reminds me of one of my favorite skeptic jokes. Question: How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?

Answer: Four. It doesn’t matter what you call a tail, it’s not a leg.

There are many other places where Briggs makes mistakes that render his arguments null; for example, the error bars (what statisticians usually call "uncertainty") are in fact made available by the Berkeley team, and are small compared to the long-term rise in temperature. For another, Briggs says I should’ve shown the plot going farther into the past, because 1973 was actually a low point. However, that’s completely wrong: it’s actually a high point! As Deep Climate points out here, this actually makes the warming trend lower. So in true contrarian fashion, Briggs is contrary even to himself. It’s bizarre.

So really, there goes Briggs’ argument. His main point is wrong, so we’re done, right?

Well, no. There’s more fun to be had here.

Beside the point

If you read Briggs’ article, you certainly get the impression that because the graph I use is statistically meaningless (so he incorrectly claims), then my whole argument about global warming is wrong.

And this is where I found myself greatly amused, though in a schadenfreude sort of way.

Think of it this way: if my argument hinged on that graph, and I removed it, my argument would have no foundation, correct? It would change the tenor of the entire blog post.

Go look at my article. If you remove that graph from it, what changes? Nothing. My main point — that the WSJ and DM articles are wrong, that we have lots of evidence the Earth is warming up, that 9 of the 10 hottest years on record occurred since the year 2000, that the DM article specifically uses scientific studies and presents them as if they say the exact opposite of what they actually say — still stands.

So even if that graph is wrong and misrepresents what I’m saying — which it does not — it doesn’t matter. In fact, I used that graph as an illustration, to show how we’re warming up. I never intended it to be the basis for the argument I was making, just a way of further showing it. If you read the actual words I wrote, including the links to many, many articles backing up my position, you’ll see that Briggs has not refuted a single actual point I made.

So even if he’s right about that graph, it doesn’t matter. And he’s not right.

But notice what he’s done. He’s taken what is clearly a minor point and blown it up as if it’s my main point. He’s used shady words (predictions, models) to cast aspersions, and to make someone (me!) look bad. Then, by "refuting" this minor issue he can then poison the well, strongly implying that all my arguments are wrong. That’s kind of a big no-no when trying to argue a point.

But it packages well. Watts Up With That, another denialist blog, has run with Briggs’ claims about me as well. He also makes the false claim that warming has stalled, and so on. Note WUWT also says the signers of the WSJ OpEd are "16 scientists", which isn’t true: not all are scientists, and only four have actually published climate science research. And don’t forget about the article the WSJ refused to print talking about the reality of global warming, signed by 255 actual scientists.

Oops.

Denialism’s dark mirror

I will admit the irony of this attack amuses me greatly; Briggs accuses me of many things he himself is doing. That is standard fare from antiscience group: creationists, global warming deniers, and alt-medders, for example, all seem to project their own tactics on the scientists with whom they disagree. Don’t like real medicine? Accuse scientists of being in the pocket of Big Pharma (and forget about the millions being made by quacks on useless "remedies"). Don’t believe in evolution? Accuse scientists of being too dogmatic. Don’t think global warming is real? Accuse scientists of misrepresenting the data.

My favorite irony is that a lot of these global warming denialists take money from fossil fuel interests, but then routinely say to "follow the money", as if it’s the climatologists who are raking in the big bucks from shady think tanks with undisclosed bankrollers. While Briggs points out he gets no money from them, he asks where my money comes from. Think on this, Dr. Briggs; how much money would I make if I suddenly turned coat and said global warming wasn’t real? I’ll guarantee you it would be a lot more than I make now, probably with a couple of zeroes added to the end. So that argument falls a wee bit flat here.

Like all the others.

Of course, given the comments I’ve seen on my blog, on Briggs’ blog, on Watts Up With That, or in any other blog discussing global warming, I know how this will go. You can bring up the major pieces of evidence supporting reality again and again, but the denialists will ignore them and go after phantoms instead. Because if they do acknowledge the actual evidence, they lose.

Over the weekend, two amazingly bad articles were published about climate change. Both were loaded with mistakes, misinterpretations, and outright misinformation, and are simply so factually wrong that they almost read like parodies.

Just so we’re clear here.

The first was in the Wall Street Journal. The article, called No Need to Panic About Global Warming, is a textbook example of misleading prose. It’s laden to bursting with factual errors, but the one that stood out to me most was this whopper: "Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now."

What the what?

That statement, to put it bluntly, is dead wrong. It relies on blatantly misinterpreting long term trends, instead wearing blinders and only looking at year-to-year variations in temperature. The Skeptical Science website destroyed this argument in November 2011, in fact. The OpEd also ignores the fact that nine of the ten hottest years on record all occurred since the year 2000.

The WSJ OpEd makes a lot of hay from having 16 scientists sign it, but of those only 4 are actually climate scientists. And that bragging right is crushed to dust when you find out that the WSJ turned down an article about the reality of global warming that was signed by 255 actual climate scientists. In fact, as Media Matters reports, more of the signers of the WSJ OpEd have ties to oil interests than actually publish peer-reviewed climate research.

Shame on the WSJ for publishing that nonsense.

When I read it, I thought that OpEd was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. But then the Daily Mail chimed in and I discovered that barrel gets a lot deeper. They printed an article by David Rose called Forget global warming — it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again).

By "Cycle 25" he’s referring to the solar activity cycle — which I’ll get to in a moment. But first, the most egregiously awful thing about the Mail article is the angle it takes on new results released by The Met Office, the National Weather Service for the UK. The subheadline for the Mail article is "Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years", which is a bit odd given that the very first two paragraphs of the Met’s press release say:

(more…)

Because I was on the road Wednesday night, I missed the first few hours of reaction to Newt Gingrich’s speech in Florida, when he said he wants to have a permanent station on the Moon "by the end of my second term". It wasn’t until Thursday morning that I opened up my web browser and saw that every blog, every news site, everyone, was talking about it. I must have had dozens of tweets and emails telling me about it and asking my opinion.

So I found a video of the speech and watched it. The only reason I didn’t laugh out loud at the nonsense unfolding from Mr. Gingrich’s mouth was that I already had seen the reaction online.

In Discover Magazine’s Crux blog I wrote a dissection of his speech and why he’s so vastly and profoundly wrong: The Newt-onian Mechanics of Building a Permanent Moon Base. You’ll get all the details there of why I think Gingrich’s plan is the worst possible way to go about trying to go to the Moon: in a hurry, with the wrong source of funding, and maybe because there’s a threat from those dirty communists.

Don’t get me wrong: I want a Moon base. I’ve written about that many times here on the blog, and for my Geek-A-Week card I asked Len Peralta to draw me as Commander Koenig from "Space:1999", for criminy’s sake. I stand second to no one in advocating exploring space, and our own satellite in particular. But it has to be done right, and Gingrich’s plan would be the worst way to do it.

In the post for The Crux I was blunt, but held back my tongue a bit because that isn’t necessarily the venue for me to do otherwise. But here, on my blog, I’ll say this: Gingrich’s words were both transparent and hollow. I knew right away what he was claiming was simply not possible, either financially, technologically, or politically. Take your pick. And it was also clear to me that no matter how you slice it, NASA would get screwed royally if his Moon base plan were implemented, since it would mean billions of dollars moved away from NASA projects to finance this. I started digging deeper to see if my first reaction was wrong, and all I found showed I was righter than I first thought. Every way you try to do it, his plan would destroy NASA. And I’m not exaggerating; the amount of money we’re talking about taking away from NASA projects to fund a base his way would leave everything else in NASA facing cancellation. It’s really that simple.

I was actually pretty stunned that people in Florida would support this idea. Obviously, they would have a vested interest in hearing big ideas about space exploration, but with just a little thought it’s clear that while Gingrich’s idea may be big, it’s only because it’s been stretched out way larger than it can handle. Its density is zero.

On the surface, it seems like Gingrich is a friend of space and science, but don’t be fooled: he’s just as likely to pander to the antiscience base as any other candidate, and his history shows he will attack science when he gets the chance. So while you might be inclined to like the idea of a candidate talking about promoting space exploration under any circumstances, have a care. Because once you get beneath that surface, you might find there’s nothing there.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, caption added by me.

Around 04:00 UTC on Monday morning, January 23, 2012, the Sun let loose a pretty big flare and coronal mass ejection. Although there have been bigger events in recent months, this one happened to line up in such a way that the blast of subatomic particles unleashed headed straight for Earth. It’s causing what may be the biggest space weather event in the past several years for Earth: people at high latitudes can expect lots of bright and beautiful aurorae.

I’ll explain what all that is in a second, but first here’s a video of what this looked like from NASA’s SOHO satellite.

Wow! Make sure you set it to high def.

So what happened here? The sunspot cluster called Active Region 11402 happened.

Sunspots are regions where the magnetic field lines of the Sun get tangled up. A vast amount of energy is stored in these lines, and if they get squeezed too much, they can release that energy all at once. When this happens, we call it a solar flare, and it can be mind-numbing: yesterday’s flare exploded with the energy of hundreds of millions of nuclear bombs!

In the image above, the sunspots are caught in mid-flare, seen in the far ultraviolet by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (it’s colored green to make it easier to see what’s what). We think of sunspots as being dark (see the image of AR 11402 below), but that’s only in visible light, the kind we see. In more energetic ultraviolet light, they are brilliant bright due to their magnetic activity.

A huge blast of subatomic particles was accelerated by the explosion. The first wave arrived within a few of hours of the light itself… meaning they were traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light!

But shortly after the flare there was a coronal mass ejection: a larger scale but somewhat less intense event. This also launches particles into space, and these are aimed right at us. The bulk of the particles are traveling at slower speeds — a mere 2200 km/sec, or 5 million miles per hour — and is expected to hit us at 14:00 UTC Tuesday morning or so. That’s basically now as I write this! Those particles interact with Earth’s magnetic field in a complicated process that sends them sleeting down into our atmosphere. We’re in no real danger from this, but the particles can strip the electrons off of atoms high in the air, and when the electrons recombine the atoms glow excite the electrons in atoms high in the air, and when the electrons give up that energy the atoms glow. That’s what causes the aurorae — the northern and southern lights.

If you live in high latitudes you might be able to see quite the display when it’s dark — people in eastern Europe and Asia are favored for this, since this happens after sunset there. But the storm is big enough and will probably last long enough that everyone should check after dark: look north if you live in the northern hemisphere and south if you’re south of the Equator. There’s no way in advance to know just how big this will be; it might fizzle, or it might be possible to see it farther away from the poles than usual. Can’t hurt to look! Also, Universe Today has been collecting pictures of aurorae from the solar blast earlier this week. No doubt they’ll have more from this one as well.

Although big, this flare was classified by NASA as being about M9 class — powerful, but not as energetic as an X class flare. One of those popped off last September, and shortly after that a smaller M flare erupted, which also triggered a gorgeous plasma fountain called a filament on the Sun’s surface.

As I said, we’re in no real danger here on Earth, and Universe Today has a good article describing why the astronauts are probably not in danger on the space station, either. Even if this were larger storm, the astronauts can take shelter in more well-protected parts of the station, too. Bigger storms can hurt us even on Earth by inducing huge currents in power lines which can overload the grid. That does happen — it happened in Quebec in March of 1989 — and it may very well happen again as the Sun gets more active over the next few years. [UPDATE: a ground current surge from today's event was reported in Norway.]

But we should be OK from this one. If you can, get outside and look for the aurorae! I’ve never seen a good one, and I’m still hoping this solar cycle will let me see my first.

Image credit: NASA/SOHO; NASA/SDO