SUNSPOTS: Earth-facing sunspots 1579 and 1582 are so large, sky watchers are noticing them without the assistance of a solar telescope. When the low-hanging sun is dimmed by clouds and haze, the two spots can be seen punctuating the sunset:
Lauri Kangas took this picture on the evening of October 2nd from Fort Frances, Ontario. ” The sun was easy to photograph safely without any protective filters due to the clouds and smoke from forest fires in northwestern Ontario,” says Kangas.
Although these sunspots are large (each one is wider than Earth) they are not very active. Their magnetic canopies contain are simply organized, containing no unstable structures that pose a threat for flares. NOAA forecasters say there is less than a 5% chance of M-flares and a 1% chance of X-flares today.
CME IMPACT: A coronal mass ejection hit Earth’s magnetic field on Sept. 30th at 10:25 UT. The impact was weak, lifting the solar wind speed around Earth barely above 300 km/s. Nevertheless, auroras are possible around the Arctic Circle as Earth’s magnetic field reverberates from the impact. Aurora alerts:text, voice.
The CME was propelled into space on Sept. 28th by an eruption of sunspot AR1577. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory caught the cloud expanding toward Earth at 2.2 million mph:
Although the initial impact was weak, a geomagnetic storm could develop in the wake of the CME.
EMERGING BLAST SITE: A farside sunspot that exploded and hurled a bright CME into space on Sept. 23rd is now rotating onto the Earthside of the sun. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the emerging blast site during the early hours of Sept. 26th:
Because the sunspot is still near the sun’s eastern horizon, foreshortening prevents a clear view of its core magnetic structure. The events of Sept. 23rd, however, suggest that this could be a potent active region. Stay tuned for updates as the sunspot turns toward Earth
INCOMING ACTIVE REGIONS: Solar activity has been low for more than a week. This could change in the days ahead as a pair of active regions rotates onto the Earthside of the sun. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the signs of their approach during the early hours of Sept. 18th:
Pictured above are the magnetic canopies of sunspots. Plasma-filled magnetic loops towering more than 50,000 km above the sun’s eastern limb herald the approach of the active regions, possibly turning a pair of flare centers toward Earth as the week unfolds. Amateur astronomers witth backyard solar telescopes should train their optics on the eastern limb; solar activity is in the offing.
ENTANGLED ERUPTION: Interrupting days of quiet, sunspot AR1564 erupted on Saturday, Sept. 8th, producing an M1-class solar flare. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Obervatory (SDO) recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash:
The movie shows more than just a single flare. This eruption was “entangled.” A magnetic tendril guided a wave of hot plasma all the way from the blast site to another active region (AR1562) on the western limb ~250,000 km away.
Since SDO was launched in 2010, the observatory has recorded hundreds of entangled eruptions. Sometimes they spread like a chain reaction to involve nearly the entire sun. A good example is the global eruption of August 2010. The moral to this story: One little flare can go a long way.
SUNSPOT AR1564: The next strong flare could be just around the corner. Sunspot AR1564 is growing rapidly and has developed a ‘beta-gamma’ magnetic field that harbors energy for M-class flares. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory took this picture of the active region during the early hours of Sept. 4th:
NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of M-flares during the next 24 hours. Any eruptions will likely be Earth-directed as the active region is turning toward our planet
MAGNIFICENT ERUPTION: A filament of magnetism curling around the sun’s southeastern limb erupted on August 31st, producing a coronal mass ejection (CME), a C8-class solar flare, and one of the most beautiful movies ever recorded by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory:
The explosion hurled a CME away from the sun traveling faster than 500 km/s (1.1 million mph). The cloud, shown here, is not heading directly toward Earth, but it could deliver a glancing blow to our planet’s magnetic field on or about September 3rd. This date is preliminary and may be changed in response to more data from coronagraphs on the Solar and Heliophysics Observatory (SOHO).
Eli MacKinnon, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 28 August 2012
A flock of homing pigeons released and tasked with finding their way home. Scientists aren’t sure why some of these racing pigeons disappear in what has been dubbed Birdmuda Triangle.
CREDIT: Gail Johnson, Shutterstock
Hundreds of racing pigeons have been disappearing over a sleepy pocket of North East England, earning the region a reputation as the “Birdmuda Triangle.”
On Saturday (Aug. 25), the Telegraph reported, one club of pigeon fanciers released a flock of 230 birds from North Yorkshire. Only 13 birds arrived at their destination in Scotland.
Some of the aggrieved hobbyists — who routinely release trained pigeons tasked with finding their way home from distances of hundreds of miles — are now considering grounding their remaining birds until the mystery is solved.
Pigeons have long baffled scientists with their uncanny navigational abilities. Earlier this year, researchers at Baylor College identified one component of the birds’ internal GPS when they showed that their brains contain a specialized group of cells that measure the strength and direction of the Earth’s magnetic field, serving as a compass. [9 Weird Animal Facts]
But what special property of a triangular region in North East England — marked off by places called Wetherby, Corsett and Thirsk, and measuring 65 miles (105 km) on its longest side — could be capable of short-circuiting a pigeon’s sense of home?
Some racers have implicated a nearby military intelligence operation, blaming rogue signals from the Royal Air Force’s Menwith Hill satellite station for jamming their birds’ instincts.
“There’s been a fair amount of experimentation on the effect of radio signals on pigeon orientation,” said Charles Walcott, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University who has been studying pigeons since 1962. “No one has ever seen any substantial effect.”
Others have attributed losses to unusually high levels of solar activity that they say have distorted the Earth’s magnetic field and, by extension, their pigeons’ mental maps. (Though it is merely following its normal cycle, the sun has been increasingly active lately.)
According to Walcott, researchers have shown that disruptions in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by solar flares do in fact jog pigeons’ internal compasses, changing the initial direction the birds choose to set off in when they’re first released. But a nationwide study published in the now-defunct Racing Pigeon Bulletin examined the results of pigeon races alongside variations in the Earth’s magnetic field and concluded that, in the United States at least, there was no correlation.
“But [the Racing Pigeon Bulletin study] doesn’t rule out the idea,” he told Life’s Little Mysteries. “It just says that over a big area there was no obvious effect; it doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be one in a small area.”
Walcott’s pick for the most plausible cause of England’s pigeon losses happens also to be the most likely explanation for the real Bermuda Triangle’s undue reputation as a mystical devourer of ships and men: bad weather.
The Telegraph reports that the section of North East England in question has been experiencing abnormally high rainfall, and some of the racers have proposed that missing pigeons may have been led far afield by their efforts to avoid storms.
“I think that explanation’s quite likely,” said Walcott. “Pigeons really do not like to fly in the rain because their feathers are not equipped for it, so in my experience pigeons will simply put down until the rain has passed.”
As for where last weekend’s 217 unaccounted-for racing birds headed when the sun came back out, Walcott says we may never know. He’s heard of mass disappearances at U.S. races before, and for some of the pigeon fanciers at those events, answers still haven’t surfaced.
“[T]hose pigeons that are lost, many of them find other pigeon lofts and go in. But some just plain disappear and you never see them again, and I don’t think anyone understands what’s going on,” he said.
QUIET SUN: Another day, another …. moment of silence? For the 5th day in a row, solar activity is low. None of the sunspots on the Earthside of the sun are actively flaring, and the sun’s X-ray output has nearly flatlined.
LATLINING: WIth no sunspots actively flaring, the sun’s x-ray output has nearly flatlined. These data from NOAA’s GOES 15 satellite show how quiet things have been on August 23rd through 25th:
NOAA forecasters say there is no more than a 5% chance of strong flares today. However, a new sunspot is emerging that could break the quiet.
