THE CARRINGTON EVENT -1859- 2012 AGAIN?

Hi, little humanoid...in 1859 a solar event turned off all eletrical energy on Earth...big feal..in 1859 we have only telegraph working with eletricity.

TODAY AN EVENT LIKE THIS WILL BE A CATASTROPHIC END OF HUMAN KIND LIKE WE KNOW...2012? brrrrr

A Super Solar Flare

May 6, 2008: At 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington—widely acknowledged to be one of England's foremost solar astronomers—was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw.

Right: Sunspots sketched by Richard Carrington on Sept. 1, 1859. Copyright: Royal Astronomical Society: more.

On that morning, he was capturing the likeness of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots, intensified rapidly, and became kidney-shaped. Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and "being somewhat flurried by the surprise," Carrington later wrote, "I hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled." He and his witness watched the white spots contract to mere pinpoints and disappear.

It was 11:23 AM. Only five minutes had passed.

Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii.

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Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted.

"What Carrington saw was a white-light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the sun," explains David Hathaway, solar physics team lead at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Now we know that solar flares happen frequently, especially during solar sunspot maximum. Most betray their existence by releasing X-rays (recorded by X-ray telescopes in space) and radio noise (recorded by radio telescopes in space and on Earth). In Carrington's day, however, there were no X-ray satellites or radio telescopes. No one knew flares existed until that September morning when one super-flare produced enough light to rival the brightness of the sun itself.

"It's rare that one can actually see the brightening of the solar surface," says Hathaway. "It takes a lot of energy to heat up the surface of the sun!"

Above: A modern solar flare recorded Dec. 5, 2006, by the X-ray Imager onboard NOAA's GOES-13 satellite. The flare was so intense, it actually damaged the instrument that took the picture. Researchers believe Carrington's flare was much more energetic than this one.

The explosion produced not only a surge of visible light but also a mammoth cloud of charged particles and detached magnetic loops—a "CME"—and hurled that cloud directly toward Earth. The next morning when the CME arrived, it crashed into Earth's magnetic field, causing the global bubble of magnetism that surrounds our planet to shake and quiver. Researchers call this a "geomagnetic storm." Rapidly moving fields induced enormous electric currents that surged through telegraph lines and disrupted communications.

"More than 35 years ago, I began drawing the attention of the space physics community to the 1859 flare and its impact on telecommunications," says Louis J. Lanzerotti, retired Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories and current editor of the journal Space Weather. He became aware of the effects of solar geomagnetic storms on terrestrial communications when a huge solar flare on August 4, 1972, knocked out long-distance telephone communication across Illinois. That event, in fact, caused AT&T to redesign its power system for transatlantic cables. A similar flare on March 13, 1989, provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station in Canada, blacking out most of the province and plunging 6 million people into darkness for 9 hours; aurora-induced power surges even melted power transformers in New Jersey. In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes. That may not sound like much, but as Lanzerotti noted, "I would not have wanted to be on a commercial airplane being guided in for a landing by GPS or on a ship being docked by GPS during that 10 minutes."

Right: Power transformers damaged by the March 13, 1989, geomagnetic storm: more.

Another Carrington-class flare would dwarf these events. Fortunately, says Hathaway, they appear to be rare:

"In the 160-year record of geomagnetic storms, the Carrington event is the biggest." It's possible to delve back even farther in time by examining arctic ice. "Energetic particles leave a record in nitrates in ice cores," he explains. "Here again the Carrington event sticks out as the biggest in 500 years and nearly twice as big as the runner-up."

These statistics suggest that Carrington flares are once in a half-millennium events. The statistics are far from solid, however, and Hathaway cautions that we don't understand flares well enough to rule out a repeat in our lifetime.

And what then?

Lanzerotti points out that as electronic technologies have become more sophisticated and more embedded into everyday life, they have also become more vulnerable to solar activity. On Earth, power lines and long-distance telephone cables might be affected by auroral currents, as happened in 1989. Radar, cell phone communications, and GPS receivers could be disrupted by solar radio noise. Experts who have studied the question say there is little to be done to protect satellites from a Carrington-class flare. In fact, a recent paper estimates potential damage to the 900-plus satellites currently in orbit could cost between $30 billion and $70 billion. The best solution, they say: have a pipeline of comsats ready for launch.

Humans in space would be in peril, too. Spacewalking astronauts might have only minutes after the first flash of light to find shelter from energetic solar particles following close on the heels of those initial photons. Their spacecraft would probably have adequate shielding; the key would be getting inside in time.

No wonder NASA and other space agencies around the world have made the study and prediction of flares a priority. Right now a fleet of spacecraft is monitoring the sun, gathering data on flares big and small that may eventually reveal what triggers the explosions. SOHO, Hinode, STEREO, ACE and others are already in orbit while new spacecraft such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory are readying for launch.

Research won't prevent another Carrington flare, but it may make the "flurry of surprise" a thing of the past.

Authors: Trudy E. Bell & Dr. Tony Phillips | Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

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EXOPLANET SEARCH-INTERFEROMETER TECNOLOGY

Hi, little creature that lives in the darkness of ignorance. This article explains the advanced technology used for hunting of exoplanets,ie, possible planets orbiting stars. It's like finding a needle in a haystack, because we can only identify small 'failures' caused by the orbit and the planet in front of the weighing vessel from the starof our framework, leading to the conclusion that something of greatmass and size orbiting the target star. It will take a few more decades until we can actually get a picture of an exoplanet, cannow estimate its mass and some density.

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INTERFEROMETER ARCHITECTURE Principle of operation Figure 1. Single Bracewell configuration. In the following we describe how planet photons can be isolated from their parent star using a nulling interferometer. Figure 1 shows the simplest nulling interferometer - the single Bracewell configuration - proposed by Bracewell in 1979. This comprises two collecting apertures separated by baseline length Β, phased such that the light from an on-axis source is canceled in the single-mode spatial filter at the beam combiner output. This is the nulled or dark output port; all the on-axis photons exit from the bright port to the left of the figure. To implement this scheme requires that a phase difference of π independent of wavelength, be introduced between the two arms. The corresponding response of the interferometer on the sky is shown in both upper panels. It is a sinusoidal corrugation with a null running through the star at the center, and an angular periodicity of λ / Β. If the array is rotated about the line of sight to the star, then this corrugated pattern rotates with respect to the star and the offset planet. While the star remains on the null, the planet follows the circular locus and the detected planet photon rate (lower right) rises and falls as the peaks and troughs of the response sweep through the location of the planet. The main disadvantage of the single Bracewell configuration is that the response on the sky is symmetric. As a result there is ambiguity in the location of the planet, the exozodiacal dust emission can have a similar signature to the planet, and (most important) it is not possible to implement an effective chopping scheme.These disadvantages are overcome with the Dual Bracewell configuration, an example of which is illustrated in Figure 2. There are now four collecting apertures. In this case, they are deployed along a line with equal spacing, phased as indicated. This configuration is essentially two single Bracewell baselines, which are then cross-combined with a third beam combiner with a relative phase shift of π / 2. The resulting response on the sky of this four-element phased array is shown in the top panel. The structure is more complex than before, and there is a clear left-right asymmetry. We will refer to this as the 'left' chop state, since there is a large peak in the response immediately to the left of the star. Figure 2. Dual Bracewell configuration. By changing the sign of the relative phases of the collectors, we obtain the mirror image response on the sky, as shown by the dashed line in Figure 3. This is the "right" chop state. By switching the phasing of the instrument back and forth between these two states, the response on the sky is chopped from left to right and back. Taking the difference of the photon rates obtained gives the "chopped" response denoted by the heavy line in Figure 3 (upper left panel) and the 3D view shown in the upper right. The chopped response is purely asymmetric, and the chopped photon rate has both positive and negative excursions. It is now possible to distinguish the side of the star on which the planet is located, and to discriminate against any symmetric sources of emission (e.g., star, exozodiacal dust). Any source of noise (e.g., stray light) that contributes equally to the left and right chop states is also removed. The lower right panel of Figure 3 shows the variation of the chopped planet photon rate with the rotation angle of the array. This characteristic signature depends on the location of the planet relative to the star. As we change the "azimuthal" offset of the planet, the signature pattern is shifted left or right with respect to the array rotation angle. Increasing the radial offset of the planet from the star means that the circular locus in the upper right panel of Figure 3 expands and passes through more peaks and valleys of the response, resulting in a signature pattern with higher "frequency. " In general, the data must be inverted to obtain the fluxes and locations of any planets that are present. Figure 3. Chopped Dual Bracewell configuration. The approach that has been used most commonly to do this is correlation mapping, first suggested by Angel and Woolf (1997). The principle is described in Figure 4. The process is closely analogous to the Fourier transform used for standard interferometric image synthesis. The cross-correlation process generates a "dirty map" (a term borrowed from radio synthesis imaging), which must be deconvolved to extract the point-like planets. The example in Figure 4 shows the noise-free dirty map for a single point source, and therefore represents the point-spread function (PSF) for the array. Because we are dealing with a phased array in which more than two collectors are combined in a single output, the PSF is more complex than for a standard imaging array in which each baseline is measured independently. There are satellite peaks in addition to the main peak, each of which has sideobes, and the PSF varies with the position in the map. These properties depend on the array configuration. Several approaches to deconvolution are possible. Up to this point the analysis has been for a single wavelength. The measurements in practice span a broad range of wavelengths (nominally 6.5-18 µm). Independent of the desire to do spectroscopy, the measurement must be broken out into a number of spectroscopic channels to avoid smearing together the different planet signatures (photon vs. array-rotation angle) obtained at each wavelength. Each of these channels is processed independently to obtain a correlation map. The correlation maps can then be co added (with appropriate weighting) to obtain the net correlation map. The wide range of wavelengths greatly extends the UV coverage of the array, suppressing the sidelobes of the PSF. Figure 4. Calculation of the cross-correlation map. The measured chopped planet photon rate vs. array rotation angle is shown in the upper left (no noise). For each possible location of a planet in the map, we can generate a template for the signal that would be obtained. This grid of templates is cross-correlated with the measured signal, and the level of correlation is plotted as the grey-scale. Template 1 would result from a planet in the upper left of the plot. The template is clearly a poor match to the measured signal, and the correlation is low. The highest correlation is obtained with template 2, which corresponds to the actual location of the planet. Template 3 is from a slightly offset location and has reduced correlation. Template 4 is from the opposite side of the star and has a perfect anti-correlation with the measured signal. References Angel, J. R. P., and Woolf, N. J., "An imaging nulling interferometer to study extrasolar planets,"Astrophys. J. 475, 373-379, (1997). Beichman, C. A., Woolf, N. J., and Lindensmith, C. A., Terrestrial Planet Finder: a NASA Origins program to search for habitable planets, JPL Publication 99-3, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA (1999).