Any link to a site for this grant? I tapped the thread title into Google and it only came up with solar flares for 2011?
yeah its a bit awks on my phone to do that. Departing sunspot 1402 unleashed an X2-class solar flare on Jan. 27th at 18:37 UT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash: Sunspot 1402 is rotating onto the far side of the sun, so the blast site was not facing Earth. Nevertheless, energetic protons accelerated by the blast are now surrounding our planet, and an S2-class radiation storm is in progress. The explosion also produced a spectacular coronal mass ejection (CME). A movie from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory shows the cloud raced away from the sun at 2500 km/s or 5.6 million mph. Update: Work by analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab shows that the CME will just miss Earth when its edge passes by our planet on Jan. 30-31. Click to view an animated forecast track: http://spaceweather.com/
I signed up for e-mails from Spaceweather.com and I received the following alert: X-FLARE: Earth-orbiting satellites detected a powerful X2-class solar flare today, Jan. 27th, at 1837 UT (1:37 pm EST). The source was departing sunspot 1402. The blast produced a spectacular CME (not Earth directed) and accelerated energetic protons toward Earth. A low-level radiation storm is now in progress around our planet. Visit http://spaceweather.com for images and updates. There is more information on the actual web site. I was quite surprised at how quickly the radiation storm started, since the solar flare was not directed directly at the Earth. Presumably protons travel faster than other particles.
Photons fastest ( but protons don't hang about from this solar source ) . I did'nt realise that these edge events produce higher proton velocities than central solar events . Have a read here http://www.windows2universe.org/spaceweather/build_storm2.html . Things are livening up on old Sol.
