Comments on: What happens when a Coronal Mass Ejection hits the Earth?

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:46:00 +0000

I heard that you can increase your Coronal Mass by taking chromium supplements.

By: Chris Lee

Chris Lee — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:24:00 +0000

Zombies.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:12:00 +0000

I like “Sun Farts” better, LOL after all it is a giant ball of gas.

By: mccrum

mccrum — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:55:00 +0000

I did, now everything looks the same! Boy, CMEs are worse than SOPA protests.

I even tried turning it off and on again, no help.

By: Guest

Guest — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:52:00 +0000

Good call, I’m looking North tonight.

By: Noctilucent Studios

Noctilucent Studios — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:34:00 +0000

What happens? People send mean tweets about Seal.

or so I’ve heard.

By: Nadreck

Nadreck — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:13:00 +0000

It happens even with much smaller, but much closer, sources of EM radiation. When they put up the CN Tower and its big antenna in downtown Toronto CN had to pay to install cathodic protection systems for the girders in some of the older office towers.

By: Martin Liebermann

Martin Liebermann — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:53:00 +0000

Nothing visible in Germany, so far. Aurora displays are not very common here, but with favorable conditions we might see them.

Thread on possible sightings:
http://www.meteoros.de/php/viewtopic.php?t=9147&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30

By: ACureuil

ACureuil — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:22:00 +0000

http://192.168.1.1
Put that in your shortcuts.

By: Chicago_SC

Chicago_SC — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:43:00 +0000

This… or nothing.

By: lavardera

lavardera — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:38:00 +0000

cool computer model of the blow out here:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/wsa-enlil/cme-based/

By: Halloween Jack

Halloween Jack — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:35:00 +0000

So that’s what gave me my X-Ray vision this morning. Heck of a thing! I’d say more but right now I’m, um, a bit distracted.

By: Stonewalker

Stonewalker — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:18:00 +0000

Huh, I found this Gizmodo story when I woke up. It says that the storm is ongoing as of the time of it’s posting, it was posted last night so…. perhaps the full force of the storm hit at 11am est?

By: julianasbananas

julianasbananas — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:16:00 +0000

Coronal Mass ejection, that’s hot.

By: Jorpho

Jorpho — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:14:00 +0000

Maybe some kind of secondary effect? Some local (and perhaps paranoid) neighbour/business/antenna facility turning on some kind of shielding in advance of the CME?

By: manicbassman

manicbassman — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:58:00 +0000

it’s clouded over completely and raining where I am, so no chance of seeing anything… typical English weather…

By: mccrum

mccrum — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:44:00 +0000

My wireless router, duh.

By: Stonewalker

Stonewalker — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:28:00 +0000

Or is it the fire demons that the sun launched at us? It’s probably just the fire demons.

By: AnthonyC

AnthonyC — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:27:00 +0000

:-)

And you would connect to…?

By: Christopher

Christopher — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:25:00 +0000

Funny, it’s been a little over an hour now and I haven’t seen any effects at all. Last Thursday (the 19th) in the early afternoon when every website I tried to get to (including BoingBoing) to suddenly became unavailable I would have worried.

Now I’m just wishing I lived close enough to the North Pole because, if there are any lingering after effects, I bet they’ll make the aurora even more spectacular than usual.

By: Andrew McKay

Andrew McKay — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:25:00 +0000

No it’s true. Look up cathodic reactions. Different metals connected together will generate a voltage potential between them and will typically cause one of the metals to corrode or oxidize. By applying an offsetting voltage you can either speed up or slow down this process.

A huge magnetic field from the sun is noticeable across large grids of pipes as a voltage. The company I work for designed electronics to provide cathodic protection of natural gas lines. Typically applying a voltage of only a couple hundred of mili-volts is enough to project the pipes.

The other interesting part is that the data from the logs on this equipment was used by a local university to study the solar flares. They were able to correlate data from the offset voltage they were applying to the solar activity that the earth is being bombarded with!

By: Stonewalker

Stonewalker — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:24:00 +0000

Question to you who are knowledgeable about electricity/radio/magnetism: This morning I noticed a quiet “buzz” or feedback-type sound coming from my crappy PC subwoofer. This is was a new noise and I’ve never had any sort of interference get picked up on this subwoofer before. I muted all input sources and turned the volume all the way up and from between 7am and 8am PST I heard some of the most wild EMI noises I’ve ever heard come out of my subwoofer. Left for work at 8.

Could this be from the CME, even though it hadn’t hit earth at that time?

By: st vincent

st vincent — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:20:00 +0000

Coronal Mass Ejection? Meh. I doubt that it will cause any problems whatsoe#@ƒ´∂¬¬ß¬¬
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By: mccrum

mccrum — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:18:00 +0000

Sweet! Now all my prepper preparing won’t go to waste! Enjoy being stuck in the dark ages guys, I’ll still have an internet connection via my generator and stockpiled nachos!

By: Jim Saul

Jim Saul — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:13:00 +0000

Is the ACE satellite itself aged/damaged by solar activity?

Is the Mars mission that’s carrying the Curiosity rover in the path of this?

I’m always happy to see news of these because of the awesome aurora photography/video, but what a bummer if some stray particle on the roulette wheel comes up double-zeroes and knocks out a key non-redundant bit of data.

By: GrymRpr

GrymRpr — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:46:00 +0000

11:45 a.m E.S.T. and the satellites are still beeping?

PowerGrid unaffected?

No Riots?

Bah, That was no fun.

By: Jorpho

Jorpho — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:44:00 +0000

They can also seep into and corrode the steel in lengthy stretches of oil and gas pipeline.

No wai! Really?

I’m very tempted to call shenanigans here, but then, I know little of pipelines.

By: senorglory

senorglory — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:31:00 +0000

the source of the original spark of life?

By: Shibi_SF

Shibi_SF — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:24:00 +0000

Fascinating! Coronal Mass Ejection sounds so much more… scientific than “sun fart”. I hope that it’s not SO intense that it messes with my connection to our WiFi printer (I was only just able to get it set up late last night).

By: Cicada Mania

Cicada Mania — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:18:00 +0000

If it’s a really bad-arse one, no more BoingBoing (except for the old zine version some of us have stashed).