Posted on 07/08/2004 11:45:39 PM PDT by neverdem
WASHINGTON, July 8 - The massive solar storms that pummeled the Earth last fall have continued almost to the edge of the solar system, causing disruptions on other planets and other surprising effects, scientists said Thursday.
In a 20-day period from October to November 2003, more than a dozen storms, including the most powerful ever measured, erupted from the face of the Sun, sending blast waves in every direction.
Because of a fleet of spacecraft dispersed throughout deep space, scientists said they now had the best picture yet of how shock waves from these storms reverberate through the solar system setting off disturbances billions of miles away.
"All of the explosions combined and threw an enormous blast wave across the solar system," Dr. Eric Christian of NASA's solar physics division said during an agency teleconference with reporters on Thursday.
The solar eruptions were so powerful that billions of tons of electrified gas shot into space at speeds of up to five million miles per hour, the fastest ever measured from the Sun, scientists said. The blast waves from the series of explosions merged as they moved out, creating a front that is now moving toward the edge of the solar system at about 1.5 million miles per hour, they said.
"You get a buildup and a consolidation as you move out in the solar system," said Dr. Edward Stone of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The storms caused minimal damage on Earth, partly because some of the most powerful blasts were not aimed directly at our planet. Earth's protective magnetosphere trapped the particles from the solar mass ejections, creating a show of "Northern Lights" so prominent it could be seen in the southern United States. The storms did cause the rerouting of aircraft from polar routes, minor disruption of some satellite operations and astronauts aboard the International Space Station to take shelter temporarily in more shielded parts of the orbiting outpost.
However, the ripple effect of the blast wave continued past Mars to the outer planets, scientists said. One blast damaged the radiation monitor aboard the Odyssey spacecraft orbiting Mars. However, the craft was able to record how the wave stretched and tore the thin atmosphere surrounding the planet, carrying part of it into space.
"Substantial parts of the upper atmosphere escaped into space," said Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This process could partly explain how Mars has lost so much of its atmosphere and water over the course of 3.5 billion years, he said.
Evidence from the Mars rover craft and pictures from orbit indicate that the planet once had an abundance of water, Dr. Zurbuchen said. Repeated assaults by these kinds of space storms could have slowly siphoned off water that would have risen into the atmosphere, he said.
Dr. Stone said that as the latest blast wave moved out, it disrupted the magnetic field around Jupiter and set off a weeklong burst of radio emissions that were picked up by the Ulysses spacecraft. The front caused a similar event when it arrived at Saturn that the Cassini craft detected as it approached the planet.
Last April, the wave was detected by the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is seven billion miles from the Sun. The blast wave is expected to reach Voyager 1, nine billion miles away, later this month, he said.
By the end of this year or early in the next, the wave is expected to reach the edge of the solar system, about three billion miles beyond Voyager 1. This boundary, called the heliosphere, is where the effect of solar radiation ends and interstellar space begins.
Dr. Stone said space physicists expected the blast wave to temporarily push out the heliosphere boundary some 400 million miles when it hits, with the edge rebounding to its normal position in a year or two.
The far-reaching effects of these solar eruptions not only indicates that they need more study, scientists said, but also that more work is needed to predict them and to protect the Earth and astronauts who venture into space from their adverse effects.
PING
What, was their air traffic rerouted too? Were there interplantary flight delays? Were beach-going rocks on Saturn told to stay indoors?
Written by another product of America's journalism schools.
That seems a pretty dubious conclusion, given that they were fairly close together in time, and the largest were also the fastest - likely overwhelming those orders of magnitude smaller.
Shocks merge though. Nose and tail shocks from a supersonic plane (like the now-defunct Concorde) merge to form a sonic boom.
The waves you describe are travelling roughly the same speeds. As I recall, the two biggest bursts travelled multiple times faster than any of the others. One of the big ones passed earlier big ones that had been ejected a week before, and got to the earth first.
What did happen was that the dispersal was extreme, with the shockwave covering more than 120 degrees by the time they reached earth orbit.
Different speed shocks still merge. Of course, if faster ones are in front, they will escape the slower ones. It's more complicated when shocks meet at an angle.
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