I’m reading the 4th Maze Runner book to my boys right now. There’s an extragovernmental organization called WICKED that took advantage of some huge solar flares that caused tremendous worldwide damage. So I’m kind of hoping that there won’t be any huge solar flares that can be taken advantage of.
It’s interesting, but not dangerous
Strong sun flares, massive earthquakes, global heat wave…I think the solar system is trying to tell us something.
This isn’t out of the normal for the sun.
We are also coming up on the high point of its ~11 year activity cycle.
Peak was ~2 years ago.
Hi yes, I’d like to order one “less interesting times” please?
Sun fart
That’s be a CME, not a flare. A flare is a near-light-speed tight stream of energetic particles. A CME (coronal mass ejection) is a lower-speed cloud of plasma. It’s CMEs that generally cause the big, disruptive geomagnetic storms (if they’re big enough, don’t diffuse too much in-transit, and make a direct hit on the Earth). CMEs and flares are correlated, but not all that tightly. Flares are closely connected to holes in the corona. CMEs are believed to be triggered by shockwaves that occur when lines of flux collapse on the corona. There’s some great satellite imagery out there that shows those lines of flux, they look like jug handles.
