Solar Facts and Space Weather
Ten years ago yesterday (5 February 2002) saw the launch of the Reuven Ramaty High-Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, or RHESSI (pronounced reh-see). RHESSI was designed to study particle acceleration and energy transport during solar flares by observing the highest energy X-rays and gamma-rays. These X-rays and gamma-rays are produced when particles (electrons and protons) are [...]
We have been getting a number of questions and comments lately regarding the possible relationship between solar activity and geological activity, such as earthquakes and volcanoes, so I have decided to look into the matter in more detail. First let us pose the science question we wish to answer: do solar flares cause earthquakes? Note [...]
On this day in 2003 (October 28), the Sun unleashed one of the largest and most geoeffective solar storms of the modern age (and consequently, one of the most studied). The eruption was part of what became known as the Halloween storms; two weeks in October and November of that year when two massive sunspot [...]
Thursday morning seemed to take longer to arrive. Expectations were certainly higher, based in no small part on the fact that most of us had flights booked to take us home later that day. Washington DC had just gotten its second massive snow storm in less than a week, adding another foot of snow to [...]
Getting out of Washington DC was not going to be easy. The city was bracing itself for the biggest snowstorm in almost a century over the weekend. The launch of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO; the first mission from NASA’s Living With A Star program) wasn’t scheduled until the following Tuesday at the earliest but [...]
On September 1st, 1859, (151 years ago today) a 33 year old astronomer called Richard Carrington, working at an observatory in Surrey, England, went about his daily duties of sketching the peculiar dark spots that he had been witnessing transiting the Sun. He projected the Sun’s image from the telescope onto a screen (never look [...]
