Space storm fizzles on arrival

Source: Yahoo! 7 News
AFP
Updated March 9, 2012, 5:45 am

A bit of a fizzer

A solar storm that shook the Earth's magnetic field has spared satellite systems, delivering only a glancing blow.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A space weather storm that was forecast to be the strongest in five years has fizzled out and ended up causing no impact to power grids or modern navigation systems, US experts said on Thursday.

A series of eruptions on the Sun this week sent radiation and solar plasma hurtling toward Earth at high speeds but in the end, the geomagnetic storm registered the lowest level, G1, on a five-step scale.

"Our forecasters really struggled with this one," said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist Joseph Kunches, comparing the bungled forecast to watching a pitcher toss a baseball but knowing nothing else until it reaches the catcher.

"We missed the spin on the ball," said Kunches.

NOAA had forecast the storm would be a level three, or "strong," and said it would be the worst since 2006. NASA had said it might even be "severe."

In this case, the "spin" that forecasters missed was contained in the orientation of the magnetic field inside the coronal mass ejection from the Sun that raced toward Earth and arrived early Thursday after a 34-hour journey.

"It is very difficult for forecasters, literally almost impossible, as you watch the coronal mass ejection come off the Sun to be able to predict the orientation of that embedded magnetic field," he said.
Kunches said there were no reports of GPS disruption, no reports of problems in terms of electric power, and that anticipated displays of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, would be visible further north than NOAA initially said.

However, the impacts could worsen over the next 24 hours as the storm continues, he said.
NOAA and NASA had warned on Wednesday that the storm could disrupt global positioning systems, satellites and power grids, and had already caused some air carriers to change their planes' polar flight paths.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station were not affected by the radiation storm, NASA said.

Geomagnetic and radiation storms are growing more frequent as the Sun leaves its solar minimum period and moves into a solar maximum over the coming years, but people are generally protected by Earth's magnetic field.

However, some experts are concerned that because the world is more reliant on GPS and satellite technology now than it was during the last solar maximum, more disruptions to modern life are likely.

The fuss began late Sunday at an active region on the Sun known as 1429, with a big solar flare that was associated with a coronal mass ejection that thrust toward the Earth at some four million miles (6.4 million kilometers) per hour).

A pair of solar flares and a CME followed overnight Tuesday-Wednesday.

NASA said the first of the two flares on March 6-7 -- classified in the potent X class and facing directly at the Earth -- was the biggest this year and one of the largest of this cycle known as the solar minimum, which began in early 2007.

In fact, it was second only to a stronger one that erupted in August.

The solar flares alone caused brief high frequency radio blackouts that have already passed, according to NOAA.

But while solar radiation storm registered a level 3, the geomagnetic storm ended up being the same minor level as a similar event in January, Kunches said.

Sun's giant sunspot unleashes powerful flare

Spectacular Solar Fire Show from Sun

Source: yahoo 7 News
Space.com
November 6, 2011, 10:55 am

Fierce storm sparks massive solar flare

Yahoo!7 Technology News

Sun's spectacular fire show

The Sun has unleashed one of the most powerful storms ever, triggering massive solar flares.

Sun's earlier storms captured

                           Solar flare. Photo: space.com

A powerful solar flare that erupted on Nov 3 from a huge blemish on the sun's surface has been classified as an X1.9 flare, ranking it in among the most powerful types of storms from our star can unleash.

The flare originated in a humongous sunspot that was sighted earlier this week, which ranks as one of the largest sunspots seen in years.

The flare "triggered some disruption to radio communications on Earth beginning about 45 minutes later," NASA officials wrote in a statement. "Scientists are continuing to watch this active region as it could well produce additional solar activity as it passes across the front of the sun."

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin Stereo sun-watching spacecraft snapped photos and video of the huge solar flare during solar storm.

A flare is a powerful release of energy that brightens the sun, and is often associated with an area of increased magnetic activity on the solar surface. This magnetic activity can also inhibit the flow of heat to the surface in a process called convection, creating darkened areas on the face of the sun called sunspots.

The huge active region on the sun right now, called AR11339, is about 80,000 km long, several times wider than the Earth.

"This large and complex active region just rotated onto the disk and we will watch it for the next 10 days," astronomers with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite wrote in an update.
Later on the same day as the flare, in another area of the sun, a burst of charged particles called a coronal mass ejection released from the surface.

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This eruption came from the back side of the sun and is headed toward the planet Venus, so should not pose any risk to Earth.

Because NASA has a suite of spacecraft observing the sun at all times from many directions, the agency was able to observe the coronal mass ejection as well as the solar flare.

Scientists say we probably haven't seen the last of activity from this dynamic region of the sun.
"The large, bright active region remains potent," officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "Odds are good there's more to come."

And recent events are just part of a larger ramping up of action on the sun lately, as our star moves toward the peak of activity in its 11-year cycle around 2013.

Comets a water source for thirsty early Earth

Excellent discover in the space
Source: Yahoo 7 News
Ben Hirschler, Reuters
October 6, 2011, 3:11 am

LONDON (Reuters) - Astronomers have found the first comet with ocean-like water in a major boost to the theory that the celestial bodies were a significant source of water for a thirsty early Earth.

 

The intense heat of the planet immediately after it formed means any initial water would have quickly evaporated and scientists believe the oceans emerged around 8 million years later.

The puzzle is where the water, which is vital for life on Earth, came from.

Reuters ©                           Enlarge photo

Past analysis of water-ice from far-flung comets suggested they could have delivered no more than 10 percent of today's oceans because the chemical "fingerprints" did not match up.

But research from Paul Hartogh of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and colleagues published on Wednesday showed a comet called 103P/Hartley 2 has the same chemical composition as the Earth's oceans.

The finding substantially increases the amount of water that could have originated from comets, which are made up of rock and ice with a characteristic tail of gas and dust. Previous models of the early Earth implied most water came from asteroids.

In the case of Hartley 2, researchers using infrared instruments on the Hershel Space Observatory found that ice on the comet has a near identical "D/H" ratio to seawater. D/H measures the proportion of deuterium -- or heavy hydrogen, which has an extra neutron -- compared to ordinary hydrogen in water.

"It was a big surprise when we saw the ratio was almost the same as what we find in the Earth's oceans," Hartogh told Reuters.

"It means it is not true any more that a maximum of 10 percent of water could have come from comets. Now, in principle, all the water could have come from comets."

Hartogh, whose research was published online in Nature, believes Hartley 2, whose current orbit around the sun does not extend much beyond Jupiter, started life in a different part of the solar system than other comets studied.

It probably formed in the Kuiper belt, which lies about 30 to 50 times further from the sun than the Earth, while the others come from the Oort Cloud, some 5,000 times further away.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

'Invisible' alien planet discovered

Impacting news from NASA's Kepler telescope was detected new planets in the universe UJWQ2TFPABYK

Source: Yahoo 7 News
space.com
September 9, 2011, 2:22 pm

For the first time, scientists have definitively discovered an "invisible" alien planet by noticing how its gravity affects the orbit of a neighboring world, a new study reports.
NASA's Kepler space telescope detected both alien planets, which are known as Kepler-19b and Kepler-19c. Kepler spotted 19b as it passed in front of, or transited, its host star. Researchers then inferred the existence of 19c after observing that 19b's transits periodically came a little later or earlier than expected. The gravity of 19c tugs on 19b, changing its orbit.

The discovery of Kepler-19c marks the first time this method — known as transit timing variation, or TTV — has robustly found an exoplanet, researchers said. But it almost certainly won't be the last.
"My expectation is that this method will be applied dozens of times, if not more, for other candidates in the Kepler mission," said study lead author Sarah Ballard, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

Finding two new planets

The Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009. It typically hunts for alien worlds by measuring the telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet crosses the star's face from the telescope's perspective, blocking some of its light.

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Kepler has been incredibly successful using this so-called transit method, spotting 1,235 candidate alien planets in its first four months of operation. That's the way it detected Kepler-19b, a world 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Lyra.

Kepler-19b has a diameter about 2.2 times that of Earth, researchers said, and orbits 8.4 million miles (13.5 million kilometers) from its parent star. The planet likely has a surface temperature around 900 degrees Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius).

Kepler-19b transits its host star once every nine days and seven hours. But that number isn't constant, Ballard and her team found; transits can occur up to five minutes early or five minutes late. That variation told them another planet was tugging on 19b, alternately speeding it up and slowing it down.

In our own solar system, scientists used similar methods to predict the existence of the planet Neptune. Astronomers noticed that Uranus did not orbit the sun exactly as expected, and surmised that an unseen planet was pulling on it. This prediction was borne out when telescopes confirmed Neptune in 1846.

Researchers know little about Kepler-19c at the moment. It takes the alien world 160 days or less to zip around its host star, and 19c's mass could range from a few times that of Earth to six times that of Jupiter, researchers said.

But 19c should start coming into clearer focus soon.

"It's a mystery world, but of course we don't expect it to remain a mystery," study co-author David Charbonneau, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told SPACE.com in an email. "Kepler, and large ground-based telescopes, should help us figure out its true identity soon enough!"
The study will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

A first for a new method

The new study isn't the first to report evidence of a new alien planet using the TTV method. Last year, for example, a different research team announced the possible discovery of a planet called WASP-3c using the technique.

But WASP-3c is still somewhat ambiguous, researchers said.
"The authors consider that result tentative, though, and are collecting more data to confirm that there are timing variations," study co-author Daniel Fabrycky, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com in an email. "The detection is much more certain in our case, as the data come from a single instrument and nearly every transit has been detected over a few cycles of the signal."
Ballard voiced similar sentiments, saying other potential TTV exoplanet finds — such as another possible world in the WASP-10 star system — aren't quite definitive.

"We are just claiming that the Kepler-19 system is the first robust discovery," Ballard told SPACE.com. "The detection we have is a better-sampled one, and it's also higher signal to noise."
Further, she added, in all other potential TTV finds, the "perturbed" alien planet has been a gas giant orbiting extremely close to its parent star — a so-called "hot Jupiter." But the Kepler mission has shown that hot Jupiters tend to be singletons, circling their stars alone.

"It puts doubt in my mind about the likelihood of an additional perturbing planet in a hot Jupiter system," Ballard said. "I'm not saying it's impossible, but it makes it a little more unlikely."
That's in contrast to Kepler-19b, which is a so-called "super-Earth" just 2.2 times wider than our own planet.

Hunting for alien Earths

Kepler's first TTV exoplanet discovery is in the books, but many more could be coming. Charbonneau, for example, estimated that Kepler might eventually discover hundreds of planets using the technique.

Many of these finds would likely not be possible using the traditional transit method, which requires a precise alignment of star, planet and spacecraft to work, he added.

The TTV technique is also sensitive enough to find smaller planets — those that are closer to Earth-size, some of which may even be Earth-like.

"That is the promise of transit timing variations," Ballard said. "I do believe it could discover Earth-mass planets, to say the least. Whether they're Earth-like, I don't know. That would require a lot more study."