Sunspots at last & Astronomy Club tonight! September 23, 2009
Posted by jcconwell in Astronomy, IYA 2009, Solar and Space weather.Tags: EIU, International Year of Astronomy, IYA 2009, Solar, Sunspots
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After many months of a dry season the first major group of sunspots for this solar cycle 24 have appeared around the bend. Now we can try our new solar filter for the 16 ” telescope….if only it would stop raining. To see more live pictures go to SOHO’s web site.
SUNSPOTs from SOHO 9/23/2009
Also telescope training tonight at teh Astronomy club. Room 2153 physical science building at 8:00 PM.
New Year, Solar Filter and a New Room! August 23, 2009
Posted by jcconwell in Astronomy, Observatory, Solar and Space weather.Tags: EIU, Observatory, Solar, telescope
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Welcome back, or if your new, welcome. Classes begin on Monday. If you come around to the second floor of the Physical Science building, you’ll see a few changes. We now have the Astro-murals mounted on some nice new boards. You will notice we now have a corner room, where computational physics was, for astrophysics research. The computation physics moved to a bigger room downstairs across from the machine shop. We’ll soon be putting in some computers to be used for both image reduction and running code using programs like Mathematica and Mathlab. We will also use the room to do instrumentation work, maintenance, and repair for the observatory.
More good news. We now have a full aperture solar filter for the 16″ telescope. So solar observation for labs and research will be coming soon.
Solar filter for the 16" telescope
Bad news, we are in the midst of the lowest solar minimum in several generations. So it’s BORING to look at. No sun spots or solar flares!
SOHO Pic from 8/23/2009....see.... NOTHING!
But if you want to keep track of the sun, or look at it when it was a little more interesting, go to the website for the orbiting solar observatory SOHO. Look at the BLOG tomorrow for details about the picnic this week, and the new podcast and open house.
Aurora Borealis – Best Light Show on Earth July 21, 2009
Posted by chemfan in Astronomy, Solar and Space weather.Tags: Astronomy, Aurora Borealis, Solar System
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Sergey Zinovichik has his blog at: http://chemfan.wordpress.com/
Aurora Borealis or commonly named The Northern Lights is a natural display of lights in the North Pole regions of our globe. The lights appear as flowing streams of color in the sky taking different shapes and contours and often look like a multicolored curtain coming down from outer space.
The light show comes to us courtesy of our Sun. Electrically charged particles produced on the Sun are ejected in all directions and a great amount of them head toward Earth. As these particles (called solar wind) encounter the Earth’s outer regions, the magnetic field of the Earth begins to interact with the particles.
What results is a change in energy and direction of the particles: they head along magnetic field lines toward the poles of Earth. Just like a bar magnet has its field lines returning at the opposite ends so the Earth’s magnetic lines come together around the poles. This is why the aurora borealis is brightest and most easily seen in the northern regions of our planet.
Image taken from Wikipedia.org
The colors that we see in the aurora get produced from the collision of solar wind with atoms and molecules of our atmosphere. Every atom and molecule has around them orbiting electrons. The electrons sit in different energy levels with the highest energy electrons being furthest from the nucleus.
Although the orbits of electrons around the atom are complicated we can represent their arrangement with a simple picture:
We can see the first important aspect of orbiting electrons: They can only have certain energies analogous to planets orbiting at certain distances from the Sun.
When a fast moving solar wind particle collides with an atom the electrons in the atom “jump up” to a higher energy level. The electrons in this excited state are usually unstable and will eventually fall back down releasing the energy they absorbed. The way electrons release energy is in the form of electromagnetic radiation or what we would call light.
Image taken from HowStuffWorks.com
The type of light emitted depends on the type of atom that was excited. This is because an oxygen atom’s energy levels differ somewhat from a nitrogen or helium atom. The energy released corresponds to a certain visible color and the color corresponds to the energy that was lost as the electron returned to its previous state. The colors we see in aurorae are regular because the energy levels in an atom are the same and because electrons can assume only certain quantized energies.
In some aurora red and green colors are prevalent. This is characteristic of oxygen atoms being excited and releasing energy. Molecular nitrogen can produce blue or violet colors. Helium in rare occasions can produce orange light. Compounds of oxygen and nitrogen can produce their own characteristic light.
When a mixture of different colors comes together the aurora we see is colored white just like the visible light from the sun put together from all the colors of the rainbow appears white.
Image Taken from APOD
The beauty of the Northern Lights can sometimes come down from the polar region and become visible at lower latitudes. This is due to periods of high solar wind corresponding to unusual activity on the Sun. In August and September of 1859 The Northern Lights were seen from the Midwestern region of the United State and were very bright. Worldwide reports of unusual aurora intensity and frequency that year were confirmed by magnetographs recording high levels of magnetic activity from the Kew observatory in England.
The southern pole of the planet experiences a similar phenomenon called Aurora Australis or Southern Polar lights and this light show is visible only in the southern hemisphere.
If you are fortunate enough to live in a part of the globe that has auroral displays you will probably agree that the light show that nature displays cannot be rivaled by anything humans can create.
Image taken from APOD
Solar Flares – What, effects, and the end of the world…? July 14, 2009
Posted by dgsphysics in Astronomy, Solar and Space weather.Tags: Solar, stars
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Steve Zownorega has his blog at: http://dgsphysics.wordpress.com/
What They Are:
Solar flares are an amazing phenomenon in astronomy. Originating from a star, the solar flare has some interesting properties that can make a strong connection to physics as well as make you wonder if we will survive the year of 2012.
A solar flare occurring on the sun. Notice the magnetic field lines that are emerging from the surface.
A solar flare originates within the sun, and is caused by a build up of magnetic energy. When this magnetic energy (stored in a magnetic field) is released, a large amount of plasma is fired from the surface, usually directly over a sun spot. This magnetic field energy is transferred into many different types of energy, one of which is stored in waves (Gamma rays, x-rays, AKA Solar radiation). The amount of this energy that is in a typical solar flare is equivalent to millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs going off at the same time. Hard to wrap your head around that? That is about 10^20 joules per second. Still wondering what that is? It would be like having 1,600,000,000,000,000,000 (1.6 quintillion) light bulbs all on at the same time. It seems like a lot of energy, but this solar flare has less energy than the actual amount of energy that the sun creates during its fusion reaction. Just think of a solar flare as a ‘burst’ of this energy.
Effects:
So with all of this energy being released, why doesn’t it effect us on earth? Well thanks to the earths atmosphere, we never get hit directly with this solar radiation. The atmosphere will deflects most of the electromagnetic radiation. However, NASA has major concerns with these solar flares due to the fact that anything outside of the atmosphere such as satellites, space crafts, and even astronauts can be effected by this mass amount of energy.
Satellites and space crafts do have to be worried about a solar flare. These electromagnetic waves (gamma/x-rays) can burn out circuitry causing many systematic failures. This is a very similar situation to an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that is used in destroying all electronic devices. With that, any electronic device sent out into space has a fail safe system which can be controlled to protect circuitry and draw large currents away from the main components in the device.
On that note, solar flares have a capability of effecting human beings. NASA is currently running a test on an artificial human being with an artificial solar flare. The reason for this test is to understand what type of safety systems we might have to give astronauts if we travel to the Moon or Mars. In this test, they will emulate what a solar flare would do to a person by having short exposures of radiation strikes to a plastic torso. This torso will have all the elements of a human by scientists placing blood in tubes and within organs through out the body. They also want to run a test where they expose this torso to 18 months (about as long as a mars mission might last) of normal radiation from the sun. Results are still pending, keep a watch on this website:
End of the World….?
You might ask yourself after reading this: When am I ever going to be effected by a solar flare? Well it may soon come. Records have indicated that in 1859 a large amount of solar radiation rained down on the earth. Richard Carrington, an English astronomer at this time, was observing sun spots when all of a sudden a bright white flash appeared on a piece of the sun for about 5 minutes. The northern lights, a common solar event that resembles this solar radiation coming down to earth, was the brightest ever recorded during this time in 1859. In 1859 journal entries through out the US (commonly seen only by the north pole) as well as many captains logs across many different oceans have indicated seeing a green glow so luminous that they could read the newspaper at 1:00AM. This is one of the largest northern light activity ever shown, and it was due to this large eruption in the sun.
A image of the northern lights
During this beauty came many other effects. One that came with the 1859 solar activity was technological problems. The telegraph system, the communication device at that time, went out of service for about 14 hours. Also, many measurement devices were also effected by having readings that were off the charts. This is due to the major effect that electromagnetic waves can have on electronic devices, which you can get more information here.
So you might be asking yourself why this concerns you? We live under the umbrella of technology. Power grids, information, communication, and basically any other part of technology could be effected by an event of this magnitude. Satellites alone in space might be greatly damaged, if not destroyed, by the solar energy.We have invested upwards to 60 billion dollars in these satellites – and these are the exact ones that help us communicate, receive and send information, and go about our daily life.
Your next question might be when will this happen again? It is estimated that something of this magnitude happens once every 500 years. An event of half of this magnitude happens once every 50 years. And the last one recorded was in 1960 – so one is on deck to happen within the next few years.
On that note, we can investigate one of the more interesting ideas that has been proposed. The Mayan’s predicted that the world is to end in 2012. One of the predictions is that it would be done by a large amount of solar activity. Now, solar flares are known to originate from sun spots, and currently there are no sun spots. Sun spot activity follows a cycle of 11 years, and we are about to enter the new cycle of sun spots. This may describe why we get these major events as described in 1859, however, I do want to remind everyone that the magnetic field (our atmosphere) of the earth is what protects us from this solar radiation. So to make a claim that we would die from solar radiation would be false.
So to give you a little recap:
I would like to leave you with a thought. Y2K was thought of as being the end of man kind, and this was due to technology. Many people were frightened due to…..yes, if you remember, it was due to a date change. Comparing Y2K to a solar flare, I just want to say that a solar flare (not properly prepared for) can do a lot more damage than a single date change.
New Podcast at 365 days of Astronomy June 18, 2009
Posted by jcconwell in Astronomy, Podcast, Solar and Space weather.Tags: EIU, International Year of Astronomy, Podcast, Solar
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Today’s podcast sponsered by the EIU physics department is at :
http://365daysofastronomy.org/2009/06/18/june-18th-themisartemis/
THEMIS which stands for “Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms” is a constellation of 5 satellites and 30 ground-based observatories studying Earth’s magnetosphere and aurora. The main aim of these satellites was to answer fundamental questions concerning nature of an abrupt and explosive release of solar wind energy stored within the Earth’s magnetotail, known as a substorm. Having achieved most of its primary objectives of establishing when and where the substorms begin, the satellite mission will split up in July to become two missions. The first, THEMIS-Low, consisting of the three inner probes will continue to study the Earth’s space environment. The outer probes will explore the space environment of the Moon and renamed ARTEMIS: “Acceleration Reconnection Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of Moon Interaction with the Sun.” NASA has extended the THEMIS/ARTEMIS mission to the year 2012.
In this podcast we talk to Dr. Vassilis Angelopoulos, UC Berkeley, the PI of the mission, Dr. Manfred Bester, the THEMIS Mission Operations Manager and Dr. Laura Peticolas, the lead Education and Public Outreach scientist for this mission. We learn about the discoveries and insights learned from THEMIS, what we hope to learn from ARTEMIS and how these discoveries can be shared with the public.
