![]() The sun's strengthening and increasingly tangled magnetic field repels cosmic rays from deep space. Solar Cycle 25 has roared to life faster than forecasters expected. What's going on? Ironically, the radiation drop is caused by increasing solar activity. Our latest measurements in July 2022 registered a 6-year low: Latest results (July 2022): Atmospheric radiation is decreasing in 2022. Our monitoring program has been underway without interruption for 7 years, resulting in a unique dataset of in situ atmospheric measurements. These balloons are equipped with sensors that detect secondary cosmic rays, a form of radiation from space that can penetrate all the way down to Earth's surface. SPACE WEATHER BALLOON DATA: Almost once a week, and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distanceīetween Earth and the Moon. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the pendant in flight and telling the story of its journey to the stratosphere and back again.Īll sales support hands-on STEM education The students of Earth to Sky Calculus are selling space pendants to support their cosmic ray ballooning program. The sterling silver pendant touched space on April 29, 2023, when it hitched a ride onboard an Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray research balloon. SATURN'S CAT PENDANT: It's a far-out gift for the cat-lover in your life: Saturn's Cat. Note to mission planners: Don't forget space weather. This has made sightings of bright "Starlink trains" like Fetter recorded increasingly commonplace.Īdding together future launches proposed by SpaceX and other companies, some researchers estimate as many as 100,000 new satellites could be orbiting Earth by the end of the decade. The entire constellation has been launched since 2019, more than doubling the number of active satellites in Earth orbit. This launch brings the total count of Starlinks in orbit to 4127, a number that would have seemed incredible less than 5 years ago. Twenty-one hours later Kevin Fetter watched all 56 satellites orbit over his home in Brockville, Ontario: Solar flare alerts: SMS Text.ĥ6 MORE STARLINK SATELLITES: SpaceX launched a new batch of Starlink broadband satellites early Sunday morning, May 14th, and landed a rocket at sea in the company's latest successful mission. To illustrate the potency of these structures, the severe geomagnetic storm of April 23-24, 2023, was caused by a filament eruption, not a sunspot. Sometimes the debris falls back to the surface of the sun, triggering a Hyder Flare two explosions for the price of one. Their eruptions can hurl massive CMEs into space. This means there are about three times more filaments than sunspot groups, with half-a-dozen directly facing Earth.įamously unstable, solar filaments are twisted tubes of magnetism filled with dense plasma. This photo from Michael Borman of Evansville, Indiana, shows at least 20 dark filaments scattered around the solar disk: Unstable magnetic filaments pose a greater threat. SOLAR FILAMENTS OUTNUMBER SUNSPOTS: If there is an explosion on the sun today, it might not come from a sunspot. No more than minor G1-class geomagnetic storms are expected. Relatively faint and slow-moving, it was hurled into space on May 12th by an erupting filament of magnetism in the sun's southern hemisphere. MINOR CME IMPACT STILL POSSIBLE TODAY: NOAA forecasters say that a CME could hit Earth's magnetic field midday (UT) on May 16th. ![]() Neutron counts from the University of Oulu's Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory show that cosmic rays reaching Earth are slowly declining-a result of the yin-yang relationship between the solar cycle and cosmic rays. Credit: SDO/HMIĬosmic Rays Solar Cycle 25 is intensifying, and this is reflected in the number of cosmic rays entering Earth's atmosphere. Sunspot AR3305 has a 'beta-gamma' magnetic field that harbors energy for M-class solar flares.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |