Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge explain the physics of our chaotic Sun and why its so hard to predict whether or not it might kill us!
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Hey or Hey. As a parent in southern California, I assume you have a healthy stash of sunscreen.
Oh yeah, we have about one hundred and ninety seven partially use containers of it. They just seem to multiply.
I know the feeling, Well, what's the strongest sunscreen that you have, the one that you use on your kids when you're going outside in a really bright day.
Well, mostly I put hats on them. That's important. But in terms of SBF, I think it's like one hundred sixty one hundred something like that.
Too bad. You don't know a particle physicist who can hook you up with some stronger stuff.
Oh boy, you have better sunscreen?
Yeah, we just wrap everything in meters of concrete.
You wrap your children in concrete, that'd be a heavy day at the beach there.
I wrap my particle physics experiment in much more protection than I wrap my children.
At least it's a concrete solution, the solid way to go.
Hi.
I am Orham, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist at uc Erin, and I spend plenty of time at the beach.
Oh yeah, what do you do at the beach? Do you swim? Do you frolic with the dolphins? Do you build sand castles? Sculptures?
I mostly just marvel the fact that I get to live in such a beautiful place, a place where other people travel to go on vacation, is just ten minutes away. And I thought, you know, if I lived here, maybe I would just never go to the beach. But no, I actually go pretty often.
I think the pictures you've posted about going to the beach, you just sit there reading physics papers.
It's the best place to read physics papers.
I'm not in the ocean.
Everybody enjoys something different about the beach, man, there's something in it for everybody.
I see that grains of sand.
And anyway have you. And in the Pacific recently it's.
Cold, also full of oil. Right now there's an oil spill going on right now right where you live.
That's true. There was recently an oil pipeline berth in Huntingdon Beach, a few miles up the coast from us. But pretty sad well.
Anyways, Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we put your brain on the beach so that it can contemplate this incredible and crazy universe that we find ourselves in. We extend our minds from the shores of Earth to the edges of black holes, all the way down to the core of suns and the early history of the universe. We think about everything that has happened, everything that couldn't happen, everything that might happen, and everything that will happen in the universe, and we try to wrap it all up in a forty five minute podcast full of silly dad jokes and explain it all to you.
Yeah, because it is a pretty happening universe. It feels like there's always something going on in this universe. It's never a boring universe. And so we like to talk about all those amazing things out there at the for us to want and all add and makes us feel cosmically connected to everything, and also all the things that could potentially kill us.
That's right, because when you look out into space, it seems like sort of a calm place, right. It's cold, it almost seems frozen, Like those stars that are up there are probably the same stars that you're great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandparents looked at when they looked up at the stars and their distant ancestors. And yet we know that the universe is actually chaotic and dynamic and sort of insane, and that crazy things can and do and will happen in the universe, crazy things that might even wipe out humanity.
Yeah, and so it'd be nice to sort of know about them a little bit ahead of time, or at least understand as it's you know, destroying humanity. At least we would know a little bit about what's going on. I mean, that would be tragic not to know what happened in those last few moments.
You'd like to understand the apocalypse as it happens. So you're like, oh, yeah, this is exactly what Daniel predicted.
I don't want to pass on confused. That seems like the worst state to do it in.
Well, that's a whole deep topic. Is it better to die ignorant or to understand what's happened to you? Boy?
Yeah, you don't want to have that like face when in your coffin where you're like, huh, you want to have a calm sreen, you know, zen look about you.
Yeah, And there's another possibility that understanding the universe and its threats might actually let you prevent that from happening, might actually save you and your children and let us prepare ourselves against these coming cataclysms.
Wait, you mean physics can be useful.
I try my hardest to be irrelevant, but sometimes despite my best intentions, I do do something useful.
Maybe we should retitle the podcast into the you Know, Humanity Survival Podcast.
Daniel and Jorge Save the.
World Daniel and Jorge explain how to survive in the apocalypse.
Somehow that would be an even more ambitious and less humble title than the one we already have.
Yeah, somehow we managed to put up a high bar for that. But yeah, we like to talk about all these amazing things in the universe and all the things that may potentially kill us. And one of those things that may spell the demise of the human rays could be right here in our backyard.
We live in a nice neighborhood the Solar System. It's a nice place to raise kids and to have life and to evolve and all of that stuff. But there are also lots of dangers lurking. We did an episode about the probability of an asteroid or a comet coming to hit the Earth and wiping out humanity. But that's not the only source of danger. The very thing that gives us life, that powers everything on Earth, might also one day fry.
Us dum dum dum. So to the on the podcast, we'll be talking about would humanity survive a massive solar flare. Now flare, I mean, I guess you mean like fireflare, not like having flare.
The sun is pretty snazzy, right.
Yeah, it's a cool Well, it's not cool. It's pretty hot, but it does have flair, for sure.
It does. I don't think that the there's any level of solar snazziness, however, which would be a danger to humanity. We wouldn't all look up a day and be like, oh my gosh, that's just so impressive and then keel over. I don't think that's possible.
It sets. The style is blinding, it's so bright.
It's brilliant. It's fashion is brilliant.
But yeah, so the sun could kill us. I mean it's solely responsible for life on Earth for sure. I mean without the sun we wouldn't be here, right, Like, we need the sun for life or heat for energy, for food, for everything.
Yeah, it's an incredible source of energy for us. But it's also a crazy, turbulent monster. It's an ocean of bubbling plasma and it's incredible. You know, you can feel the heat of this fire across almost one hundred million miles like you've ever been to a campfire and then your kids like put too much wood on it, and it grows momentarily like so big you got a backup, and even just like taking a foot or two step backwards, suddenly it feels much much cooler. That's because the intensity drops very quickly with distance. It's like the radius squared. So now imagine a fire so strong, so hot, so intense that you have to take one hundred million miles worth of steps backwards, and yet you can still feel its heat across that distance of space. That's an incredible fire that's burning up there in the sky.
Yeah, and even that far it powers everything on Earth, basically all the plants and animals. We're all here moving around because of the Sun that far away.
And yet we're so sensitive to it operating at exactly a certain level, Like if it cranked up ten percent in its brightness, it would throw everything off on Earth. If it went down a few percent, we would all be very, very chilly. So we rely on the Sun being where it is and not changing its performance.
Basically ever, I guess, because you know, life evolves here on Earth kind of in sync with the Sun, right, Like if the Sun had been at another level, then life would have evolved totally differently, and we would be maybe have thicker skin or live underground, maybe more.
Yeah, life would have evolved to match whatever circumstances were here. But you know, if it was really variable, if the sun got like fifty percent hotter every other year and fifty percent colder, that would be a real challenge. And it might be that life could evolve to live in some weird circumstances, but it might not be right. Some circumstances you just can't survive, Like if the sun is constantly bathing you with sterilizing radiation, it might be that life just never kicks off.
Or the market fluctuations where the sunscreen industry would be all over the.
Place, Those poor investors, Oh my god.
Yeah, mister copper Zone would be out on the street.
Yeah, what would you do without his third and fourth vacation homes. I mean, seriously, is that even really life?
That seems inhumane. But yeah, this was actually a question from a listener from the Netherlands. Colin had a question about how back can a sunbird get?
That's right, This is a question that came I think on Twitter from Colin who was wondering like, could something happen on the Sun or in the Sun, which emits so much crazy radiation that it could actually wipe out humanity.
Right, because I guess the Sun is kind of volatle right, and not exactly predictable. I mean, it's a giant, swirling ball of nuclear fusion explosions.
Yeah, it's exactly not predictable. You know, we do not understand the Sun. There are basic things about the Sun, like the fact that has an eleven year cycle where it's hotter and colder and brighter and dimmer, and the magnetic field flips that we just don't understand the very basics of. But it's not like it's easy.
You know.
It's a huge ocean of plasma, and plasma is extraordinarily complex to model because it's very strong, very powerful interactions. So to really understand what's happening, you have to like really understand how everything is pushing on everything else and simultaneously one hundred trillion particles all moving together. It's a very complicated thing to understand.
Yeah, and hopefully something we can understand in the future. Otherwise we might be toast.
Literally we wouldn't be toast, we'd be the thing that they spread on toast.
We would be the soft buttery spread now.
I guess you'd call it humor mite or something.
All right, Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had the same questesson as Colin or had thought about whether the sun could or could not flare up and kill us all. So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people could a massive solar flare wipe out humanity?
And thank you to everybody who participated. If you would like to get deep, dark, pessimistic questions from a random physicist online in your inbox, then please write to us two questions at Danielandhorte dot com. I'll send you the questions right back. You can record them at home on your phone or computer however you like, and send them right back to us. It's easy, it's free. You get to be on the podcast.
So think about it for a second. Here's what people had to say.
I think a massive solar flare could definitely wipe out humanity. I don't think it would be directly. I think it would be like, for example, it would maybe ignite fire in our forests, making it hard for us to breathe and then it would happen that we would go extinct because of that. It would definitely break our technology and satellites in space, but that wouldn't theoretically wipe us out. But I think the aftermath of it, depending on how massive it is, it could definitely make us fight for our lives somehow.
I'd say, yes, a massive solar flare is able to wipe out humanity. We have the Mandamy Shield to protect us right now. But if that changes over it weekends, or if the flare is like really really huge wapper overflare, then yeah, I guess it should be powerful enough to wipe out the humor. Recis, Sun is massive so compared to the Earth, so yeah, I guess it should be possible.
It depends on your definition of massive. If a solar flare was massive in the true physics sense of the term, then that mass would have enough force and by proxy enough energy that when it reaches Earth it could at least damage Earth in some way. And I suppose a massive enough solar flare could wipe out all living things on Earth.
All right. Doesn't look good for humanity here. Popular opinion doesn't seem to think too highly of the Sun's safety.
I think people are just looking up and realizing, oh my gosh, think about how close we are to this crazy, intense monster that you know, we're trusting it to behave itself.
Yeah, and what if you get caught out without a parasol or a hat right exactly?
Or you know, we do have some protection, but really, how strong is that? And could it survive when the Sun doesn't behave itself?
So, usually the Sun is just sitting there kind of exploding or burning or churning or you know, diffusing and glowing. But sometimes it has something that's called a solar flare. So let's get into that, Daniel, What exactly is a solar flare?
Yeah, solar flare is essentially an intense period of radio sh and from the Sun. Now, the Sun of course always pumping out radiation, this fusion going on in the Sun which heats up this plasma to incredible temperatures, and then the Sun glows at its surface, which means it's shooting off lots of photons, but also it's shooting off protons and electrons and all sorts of stuff. That's the kind of stuff we call the solar wind. So the reason it's dangerous to be out in space. For example, even on a calm day of solar weather is because the solar wind is a huge amount of radiation, and so if you're out there for too long, you just have these streams of particles passing through your body, potentially messing up your DNA and giving you cancer. So, like on a calm day, the Sun is already pumping out a lot of radiation and we're normally protected from that radiation because we have a magnetic field and we have an atmosphere, so that's like a shield and a blanket that protects us from the solar radiation.
So usually we are getting bombarded by radiation from the Sun, but it's okay, or like, at least life has sort of gotten used to it as we know it here on Earth.
That's right. Some of it makes it through the magnetic field and Earth and comes down and is radiation, which you know happens, and that's part of why life mutates at the rate that it does, because occasionally a crazy particle from the Sun will make it all the way down and hit your ancestor DNA and make you a little stronger or make your hair a little darker, or make your eye change a little color, or make it immune a little smarter or something, and so that contributes to natural selection and that's good. And that's not just from the Sun. We also get cosmic rays from other stars and from other parts of the galaxy and maybe even extracalactic we don't know. So there's all sorts of radiation coming down from space, and that's just sort of like the background, the basics, right, But what we're interested in is when the Sun isn't just sort of like cooking along on a quiet day, when it acts out, when it does something a little different. So one thing it can do is something called a solar flare, which is just like an intense localized burst of radiation. And you know, this can last for minutes, it can last for hours, but it can shoot out a lot of radiation towards the Earth.
I see. It's not just like UV rays that are danger. It's actually shooting all kinds of stuff out and showering.
Us with it, exactly. And there's two categories of this kind of thing. There's a solar flare, then there's also something else called a coronal mass ejection. A solar flare is mostly radiation. You get extra protons and photons and gamma rays. But sometimes what happens on the Sun is that it's sort of like you get like a bubble burst, like a burp or something sort of like imagine watching like really good, really thick tomato sauce bubble.
Right.
The surface of it is usually just like sitting there bubbling quietly, but occasionally you get like a bubble forms in a splat and a sprays like your kitchen with a little droplets of tomato sauce. Right, same sort of thing happens on the surface of the Sun. Sometimes the magnetic fields get a little twisted and caught up and there's a little bit of a burp or a bubble bursting. It can actually eject real plasma out into space, like basically a scoop of the Sun itself, the plasma of the Sun. It's sent out into space, and this is called a coronal mass ejection. So you have the solar flare, and then you have the ronal mass ejection. We don't really understand if they're related, if they're parts of the same thing, but the coronal mass ejection is much more dangerous.
Seems a little rude of the Sun to be burping in our direction without covering its mouth.
Maybe we need to invent like massive solar and acids.
Yeah, or send it to etiquette school, you know, solar etiquette school.
I see, you think you should be burping in the direction of another planet.
You should be at least covering its mouth. I don't know.
Or so you think like a cosmic napkin is the solution of this problem.
Yeah, there you go. We can build that, right, build anything.
I'll call my favorite engineer and ask them about it.
Yeah, giant concrete napkin in space. But yeah, so it seems like you're saying there are two things. One is a solar flare, which is just like we notice a huge spike in the radiation from the Sun. And then there's something else, which is like an actual process we're aware of, which is like when the Sun burps or where there's like a bubble in the sun. Those are two different things.
Those are two different things that we observe. They might be parts of the same process we just don't really understand. Like usually a coronal mass ejection also has solar flares associated with it, but solar flares don't always lead to coronal mass ejections, and sometimes the connection between them is hard to understand. You know, this is just like we are observing, we are writing stuff down in our notebooks. We do not have a great theory for what's going on inside the sun that can predict these things at all. We're just like really in the very early days of trying to develop models for the inside of the sun, and so we don't understand these that might be part of a larger phenomenon, they might not interesting.
So sometimes there are unexplained spikes in radiation from the sun, is what you're saying, Like we don't know where they're coming from.
Yes, all the time, Like every single one is unpredicted. Like we see them, we're like, oh, well, look what's happening. It's not like somebody can tell you next week there's a good chance of a coronal mass ejection. It just happens, and we observe it and we write it down and we hope that the scientists can eventually figure out what causes it and maybe even one day predict them.
Now, are these related to you know, when you see pictures of the Sun, you see like these like loops of plasma or arcs of plasma that kind of you know, go up and then back down into the Sun. Are those the coronal mass ejections.
Coronal mass ejections are like those that are these big loops that form and then burst. But the dangerous thing is when they burst and they send the blob of plasma out into space. A lot of those loops just collapse and go back into the Sun. What's really dangerous is when the magnetic fields get twisted in such a way that they snap and they send that plasma out instead of it collapsing back in. And it doesn't always have to be dangerous for us, Like it can send a coronal mass ejection out towards Jupiter and just miss us. Right. It's not often that one of these will actually wash over the Earth because we are a tiny target far away, but sometimes it will.
It's like an actual piece of the Sun that it shoots out.
Yeah, exactly, just like that bubble on your tomato sauce is made of actual hot, scalding tomato sauce, right the same way. This coronal mass ejection is like a scoop of the Sun that's been sent out into space.
All right, Well, let's get into what might be causing these coronal mass ejections or soldar flares, and what the dangers are. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about solar flares, which are intense outbursts of radiation from the Sun and these can be pretty powerful, right Daniel. They're like, you know, megaton level bursts of energy.
It's an enormous amount of energy. Some of these have the equivalent of like ten billion mega ton bombs.
Ten billion like Hiroshima bombs.
Yes, it's an incredible amount of energy, like billions of tons of material from the sun. Gets shot out into space, and you know, the Sun doesn't even notice. Right, It's like a tiny, tiny, tiniest fraction of the Sun has no impact on the mass of the Sun. But you know it's significant compared to the Earth.
Yeah, it's like maybe about the mass of the Earth kind of or more.
Now, the Earth is much more massive than these, but it carries enough energy to do some serious damage, something we could really detect here on Earth.
Well, you were saying earlier, there are solar flares and then there are coronal mass ejections, but we don't know if they're the same thing. Do we know what's causing either of them.
We don't know what's causing either of them. We know something about the category of idea that might underlie both of them. That just has to do with understanding the dynamics of a very very complex system, which is the Sun. You know, it's basically like an ocean of plasma. But plasma is not like just the hot gas. Right. You can think about how complicated a hot gas is. It's got particles whizzing around in every direction, sometimes bouncing off each other, but gas is usually neutral. In a plasma, it's so hot that the electrons have left their little atoms and they're flying around on their own. And now the atoms also have electric charge. So everything in there doesn't just have a lot of energy, It also has charges, positives and negatives, and so there's a lot of interactions. Now you want to understand what's going to happen. You want to think about like a particle moving through that, it's getting tugged on and pulled on by everything else in that plasma. It's a real mess. We have difficulty understanding like how a plasma works inside our fusion reactors where it's just like a single little loop of plasma. Now imagine modeling like an entire sun and it's got oceans and convections and currents inside of it that we don't understand.
Yeah, I imagine like if you have a current of you know, positively charged ions or electrons, and that's going to generate a magnetic field, and then that's going to affect the flow over there, and so it gets really complicatedly fast.
And that's exactly the right way to think about it in terms of flows. It's not just like a bubbling tomato sauce, right where everything's just sort of sitting and bouncing around. It has flows in it, and we know that because those flows are charged particles, which means there are currents, which means it generates magnetic fields. And the Sun has a very very powerful magnetic field, so that means that there are these currents of plasma, these incredibly vast currents of plasma, right like, tubes of plasma bigger than Jupiter, right Like, the width of Jupiter is small compared to the width of these currents of plasma flowing through the Sun. But they're not just calmly flowing in a circle the same way year after year. They change and they swamp. These are very powerful magnetic fields that sometimes get tangled up and sometimes snap and things change directions suddenly. So that's why it's not very calm and why it's very chaotic and hard to predict what's going to happen.
It's kind of like a weather almost, right, Like, it's so unpredictable. Anything could happen, Like a small solar butterfly could end up, you know, causing a huge solar flare on the other side of the Sun.
Yeah, or imagine taking you know, a bowl of hot spaghetti noodles, right and jiggling them and then trying to understand like where each of them are going to end up. It's really complicated how these things interact and tangle up with each other and don't and so to understand like when this is going to happen. We think that maybe it's connected to when these magnetic field lines get so twisted that they have to like suddenly snap in one direction to get reorented to like settle down. But we don't really know. Our models are not sophisticated enough to predict when this might happen. It's just sort of like the general idea we have about what might be casting it.
It's all spaghetti. Yeah, you seem to be really jones in for some spaghetti and tomato sauce here, Dani, you is it lunchtime?
No. I was making a pizza last week and we were added tomato sauce. And you know, I hear that everybody always says jarred tomato sauce is garbage compared to tomato sauce. You make it home. But I never really believed that until we were out of tomato sauce. But we did have cans of tomatoes and it was like all right, I'll make some tomatto sauce. And then I was like, wow, this is what everybody's talking about. So now I'm hooked. And I got like bubble and pots of tomato sauce in my house all the time. So yes, I got tomato sauce on the brain. I will admit you.
Have there were sun glasses when you look at it, just in case something bubbles up.
I have a very powerful magnetic field so that tomato plasma doesn't enter my atmosphere.
As chaotic as tomato sauce is, the sun is also a pretty chaotic. It's got magnetic fields and flows and so it's pretty unpredictable. But it's sort of going in a cycle. Right. You were telling me that the sun kind of has a cycle to it.
It has an eleven year cycle and it's very regular, right, And every eleven years, the magnetic field of the Sun flips. Right, it goes like north becomes south, the south becomes north, and this is crazy. Yeah, you know, the magnetic field of the Earth also flips. We covered it in a podcast. It's not something we understand very well. And it happens much more irregularly, like sometimes every fifty thousand years, sometimes every million years, and it hasn't happened in a long long time. But on the Sun it happens every eleven years like clockwork. And this eleven year cycle is also connected to like the intensity of the Sun and the frequency of these solar flares and these coronal mass ejections. So this some like very powerful eleven year cycle going on inside the Sun that determines how everything operates. Interesting, it's like a clock that's weird, and we don't know the source of it, and so on Earth, we sort of know that the magnetic field of our planet is due to the iron and the molten core kind of rotating and flowing. But what's happening in the Sun. The Sun doesn't have like iron in the middle, does it. I mean it has some iron, I imagine, but not that much. But it doesn't have to be iron. All you need are currents, right to get a magnetic field. What you need are currents in motion, charged particles moving create magnetic fields. And so even just protons, right, the Sun is mostly protons and electrons. You can think of it as hydrogen, but it's plasma. So those protons and electrons and the hydrogen atom have broken apart, so it's mostly just a huge swarm of protons and electrons, and those things in motion are a current, and those currents and loops will generate magnetic fields. In the same way that ionized metal inside the Earth is swarming around creating magnetic fields, plasma of protons and electrons inside the Sun is doing the same thing, but much more powerfully.
I guess it's weird because you're saying it's totally chaotic and unpredictable, but we know it's also doing it in an eleven year cycle, so there must be some predictability about it.
There's definitely some predictability, and we should be able to figure it out eventually. We just haven't, Like we can't predict it. But you know, like everything in the universe, at one level, it's a chaotic, buzzing insanity that can't possibly described in simple terms, but there's always a way to tell, like an approximate mathematical story about it and to say, like, here are the most important bits, or here we can boil it down to this and that we can describe, and so you know, while there are bits of it that we can't predict that are always going to be chaotic, there are also elements of it that we think we will be able to predict, because, as you say, there are regular patterns there that we hope to be able to like connect to our mathematical ideas. And that's in the end, what physics is is taking this crazy, chaotic universe and trying to boil it down summarize it using approximate mathematical stories.
Right, that's pretty cool you were saying that. You know, sometimes the Sun just has these flares where there's increased radiation, and sometimes it's not due to these bubbles in the sun. So do we have any ideas about what might be causing these outbursts of a radiation? Is it just the whole sun suddenly burns brighter for some reason?
Yeah, So the solar flares are also still localized, right, Like, it's not like the entire sun gets brighter. There's like spots on the Sun which generate intense bursts of radiation. But again that's not something we understand. And sometimes these are connected to chernal mass injections, but sometimes they're not. So solar flare is not like the entire sun getting brighter all of a sudden it's like spots of the sun getting brighter, and solar astronomers people who look at the sun you can see these things. Don't look at the sun unless you have special technology for dimming it. But if you watch the sun you can see these dots formed sometimes, and those are solar flares of intense patterns of localized radiation from the Sun.
Yeah. I think we're used in our heads of thinking of the Sun as this like you know, bright disc that's one color and it's homogeneous and it's burning. But it's actually like if you look at pictures of the sun, it's pretty the texture like has a ton of texture to it, and you can see all kinds of swirling patterns on it if you look at the right photograph of it.
Yeah, it's really kind of beautiful. Actually, it's incredible. It's just like a big ocean, you know, not a tomato sauce, but of plasma, and it's quite gorgeous to watch.
Actually, all right, well, let's getting into the danger of the solar flares. You know, we joke around that you need extra sun block, but if it's big enough, that probably won't help you.
Yeah, that's right. These things can be really significant. Now, the solar flares probably won't do like any damage to Earth because the magnetic fields we have in the atmosphere are likely to protect us. But these coronal masss they represent a significant danger because if their magnetic field is oriented in the right way, you can sort of slip between the lines of our magnetic field and it can really wash over the Earth and dump a lot of energy. And this is not hypothetical, like this has happened in the past, in recent recorded history.
Yeah, actually in like the last couple of centuries, right.
Yeah, one of these things hit Earth in eighteen fifty nine. This enormous mass of energy hit the Earth. And there was a guy named Carrington who was actually watching the sun just before this happened, and he was like noting these sunspots, and he noticed a bunch of big sunspots, more than he'd ever seen before. And then a couple of days later, telegraph networks across the Earth started to go crazy, like sparks were flying from people's telegraphs, and people who were touching wires got shocked. And there was so much energy in these things that it created like an artificial dawn. People like got up and thought oh, the sun is coming up, even though it's like two in the morning. And they got up and like started to make breakfast and stuff. It was like a major event. People had like religious epiphanies.
It's like enough for people to think it was the actual sun, right, like it lit up the sky.
Yeah, or they thought it was the end of days, you know, because it was a pretty weird thing. Like imagine not understanding anything about astronomy and seeing an eclipse, right, it feels like, WHOA, something weird and mystical is happening, right, something in the sky, something that affects the entire Solar system or the universe. It seems to you this is an event at that scale right middle of the night. The sky is glowing and everything that's electric is like giving off sparks and shocking people. Like it was a crazy event.
And you're saying Carrington kind of saw it coming, like he looked at the telescope, and so the the visuals of these the solar flares or coronal mass ejections, came before the actual coronal mass ejections.
That's right, because the coronal mass doesn't travel as fast as the solar flare. The solar flare is like light and protons traveling near the speed of light, whereas the coronal mass subjection it's like this bubble of the sun. It takes like a half a day at two days sometimes to get here from the sun. So she got a little bit of warning. So he saw these like bright flares happening and then boom a couple days later, enormous event where everybody's getting shocked if they're touching something electric.
I wonder they also saw a spike in like, you know, sunburns and skin cancer, you know that in the months following that event.
I'm sure there were. Yeah, I don't think they kept records like that, but I'm sure there were. Because it was a huge radiation event. You know, everything around you that can conduct electricity got pushed by all the crazy intense radiation particles coming in and hitting those wires and pushing the electrons in them, creating you know, this physical event where like that energy from the sun is turned directly into electricity. It's an amazing amount of energy required to do that, and so that also happened inside your body. Wow.
I wonder if it created a whole generation of superheroes too. In eighteen fifty nine.
That's right, they can make butter like nobody before them.
Well, and it happened not to is in eighty fifty nine, but are also a few times in the next couple of years, right.
Yeah, we had big events also in eighteen seventy two and nineteen twenty one, not quite as big as the original Carrington event, but it got people curious. They were like, wait a second, how often is this going to happen? So then people started digging into the historical records and looking at like rings of trees, really really old trees to see if you can see evidence. And they found like these cedar trees in Japan that are super old that show evidence that in seven hundred and seventy five, that's like thirteen hundred years ago, there must have been this massive event because it left all this extra carbon fourteen on these trees. These cosmic rays hit nitrogen and broke nitrogen down into the special form of carbon, and they think, based on the amount of carbon fourteen in these rings, that this must have been an event ten or twenty times more powerful than this Carrington event. We're talking about one hundred and fifty years ago.
Wow, it created carbon like it split atoms here on Earth.
Yeah. Absolutely, this is really crazy intense radiation.
That would be bad news if it happened today.
That would be very bad news if it happened today. Absolutely, it was bad news back then. But our civilization didn't have electricity and wasn't dependent on an incredible infrastructure which was delicate and could be knocked out by such an event. So you know, people got a little sick, or maybe they've got skin cancer or whatever, but the civilization mostly survived. And look even further back in time and see evidence from ice cores of similar events because again it changes the chemistry of the stuff on Earth, and we think that there was an event like in six' sixty BC, and then further back in BC there we could also see evidence for these events. So this is not a periodic thing. It doesn't happen on a regular cycle, but it's something that happens not too infrequently in the history of our sun.
Wow, it like it literally scars to Earth kind of right, it leaves a memory of it, just like.
A super volcano, Right, we'll leave a layer of ash in the volcan and geological record. This frying from the Sun will leave like a scar on the earth which you can see thousands of years later.
Make a little charring kind of All right, well, let's get into what the consequences of something like that happening today would be, how bad would it be, and what we could do about it. But first, let's take another quick break.
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Right, Daniel? Exactly how much sunscreen would I need to survive one of these solar flares? Are we talking tubs? Are we talking pools of it? What can I do?
Well?
You should definitely not be outside when it happens. You should be inside, And you know these things are powerful but it's not like the death star shooting array of the Earth that's.
Gonna exploit it. Right, good, good, that's a good thing.
Let's just try to put people at ease here. You know, some people are on their commute, some people are listening to this trying to fall asleep. We don't want to give anybody a nightmare. It's an incredible amount of energy and radiation, but mostly what's sensitive to it are things that can conduct electricity because those things absorb this energy very effectively.
I mean, like the worst it could have will happen is, you know, the night sky might get brighter, or you know, people might get a little bit of more of a sun tin. But we wouldn't like blow us out, blow our atmosphere away, wouldn't like toast half of the Earth.
Yeah, it's not like that scene and Terminator where she's watching the nuclear bomb go off and her face melts or something. That's not what's going to happen.
Which version of Terminator that you've watched? Oh boy, I watched the PG version.
No, it's much more indirect, Like if you are the owner of an expensive communications satellite up in space, then probably it's going to get fried and you're out a few billion dollars if you are up on your roof adjusting your telephone aten and when it happens, then you might get fried by the shocks from something metallic. So it's mostly they're just going to knock out a lot of our electrical infrastructure.
Why only things that are metallic, you know, like, why don't trees get burned?
Yeah, the energy can get deposited in trees also, But you know, metals are just great ways to absorb this energy because they have all these electrons floating around in these conduction bands that can absorb this energy and start to flow. Right, these are charged particles coming in, so they're going to like to interact with other charged particles.
So like if you have a satellite out in space, it's going to get all these charged particles, which is going to like accumulate and cast sparks and cause your circuit to just like pop and burn out.
Essentially, every wire that's going to exist everywhere is suddenly going to have much more current in it than it was ever designed to have. So if you have delicate chips or capacitors or whatever, everything is suddenly going to be super high voltage and that's not good for your electronics, right.
Yeah, not good for our society, which is like so dependent right now on phones and power grids and GPS, and that would be bad news, right, Like planes couldn't land. Maybe people would get lost on their way to the vacations.
That's right. Your tesla suddenly would have no idea how to autodrive. You have to like wake up and actually steer for yourself. Yeah, but essentially, anything that's electrical is going to have high current passing through it, and so anything that's on is really in danger. But if you power things off and disconnect things, then you might be safe.
Oh really, well, if it's off, it won't burn out.
That's right. If you like disconnect things from these power sources, right, then you won't get a surge. Like, for example, if you disconnect your house from the electrical grid, then you're not going to get a big surge of energy because that energy comes from all that current being accumulated on those miles and miles of wire and then being delivered to your house. But if you disconnect it, then it's just going to go to a spark on the air.
I thought you meant like the radiation will come to my house from the sky rain down and then it will fry my circuits. But you're saying only the things that are connected to a larger grid.
Things that are connected to a larger grid will have more intense surges. But you know, everything will have something of a surge. Absolutely, So every piece of fiber, every wire out there is going to get a little bit of current. But you know, if you disconnect things, then the wires in your microelectronics won't have a chance to accumulate as much current.
I guess I'm worried about my phone, Daniel, I'm really concerned here about my phone. Is my phone going to be all right?
Yes? So if you protect your phone, you still should be able to check Twitter. And so that's the key, really is knowing that this is going to happen can allow us to do what we can to protect our most delicate electronics. So the key is prediction. If you can tell this is going to happen a couple days in advance, or a week in advance, or a year in advance, then you can get ready for it.
Right. You could slather some sunscreen on your phone or your you know, digital archives to protect it.
Exactly. And that's the problem is that we don't really yet have the ability to do that. These things happen unpredictably. We don't know when the next one is going to be. Is it going to be tomorrow, is it happening right now, is it going to be in one hundred years. We just don't know because we don't understand the sun well enough yet.
But you know, in Carrington's event, Carrington looked at the sun, saw something, and then saw the consequences of that later. Couldn't we do that now? I mean, we have telescopes that could look at the Sun, and couldn't we say, oh, look it's bubbling up. Maybe we should hide all of our phones.
Yeah, But what Carrington saw is a solar flare essentially, which doesn't always lead to a coronal mass ejection. And so while it's often connected, right, and in this case it clearly was, you can't, like, you know, turn off society every time you see a big solar flare coming, because you're gonna get a lot of false alarms.
It might be good for society, though, if everyone turn up their phones more often just to be safe and sane at the same time.
That's right, society. W I camp out. Everybody go camping, turn off all the lights, enjoy the stars while we let this radiation wash over us.
But I guess, you know, isn't there other warning signs? You know, if it's shooting this much plasma at us, wouldn't it also you know, have shot light towards us as well, Like, wouldn't there be some sort of sign that precedes the actual like plasma coming to us?
Yeah, And so if we're lucky, then there's like a solar flare at the same time pointing at us. But we don't always know that the solar flare is going to mean a coronal mass ejection, and so we can tell we can watch the Sun. We can like point our telescopes at it and look at it. We can see the kernal mass ejection happen before the plasma gets to Earth. So we can have like a day or two warning. But it'd be nice to have more than that, right, It'd be nice to know when these things are going to happen, so we can really like batten down the hatches.
Right, Yeah, Well, what else are we doing about it? Are we sending any probes out there to maybe like catch these things earlier, or to study the Sun more closely.
We are trying to build a model of the Sun from the inside out. We want to understand all the layers of the Sun, you know, magnetically and all the plasma layers, and to do that we are sending probes to get more information. There's something called the Parker Solar Probe launched in twenty eighteen that's going to come within ten solar radii of the center of the Sun and travel at ze point six percent of the speed of light. It takes these crazy or like zooms in towards the Sun and then goes back around the back side of it, gathering as much data as it can while it goes really really fast, and then zooming back out again and going around Venus for another loop. It's going to do a bunch of these loops, and it's going to take a bunch of data about what's going on close to the Sun and take pictures and measure magnetic fields. And that data is absolutely critical for us to build our models of what's going on inside the Sun, because if all you know is what's happening really really far away, it's hard to tell what's going on inside so the more you can get close up pictures, the more we can say, oh, this model doesn't work, that model doesn't work, and we can refine on models to get better predictions of what's going on.
Interesting, it's like we have models of the weather here on Earth that are pretty good. Maybe we can build like a weather model of the Sun.
Yes, exactly, a solar weather model, space weather model. And a lot of the models we have here on Earth are good because we have taken data inside clouds and said, what really is going on inside a cloud? What is the temperature and pressure and the wind speed inside a cloud, for example, And that's helps us understand what's going on in the same way. We'd love to know what's going on inside the Sun. But of course we can't actually send anything into the Sun and get messages out. It's sort of like an event horizon almost. But we can send stuff close to the Sun, and so the ESA also has a project called the Solar Orbiter launched in February twenty twenty that's going to go over the close to the Sun. And we have a really cool solar telescope that the NSF built that's looking at the Sun and trying to get like really really fine grain images of the surface of the Sun to image these like bubbles and loops and you know, this turbulent flow on the surface of the Sun.
So it could be your job to look at the sun. Basically, you could go back to your parents and be like, see, totally not to look at the sun. But guess what I do for a living.
I save the world by staring at the sun.
That's pretty cool. And I was thinking, like that would be cool to be the first like solar weather person. You know, sounds like an easy job to just go up to the map and be like today, it's going to be sunny, sunny, sonny, sunny, and more sunny.
And crazy sunny tomorrow. And you know, we're talking about like serious radiation events and trillions of dollars in damage to satellites and infrastructure.
You know.
But the question really Colin had was is this going to wipe out humanity? And I think my answer to that one would definitely be no, Like, even if we destroyed all of our technological infrastructure, people will survive. I mean a lot of people wouldn't, but some people would survive. Civilization would collapse, but you know, out of the ruins. Somebody would still be alive, hunting through supermarkets, eating cat food or whatever. It's not like it's going to actually literally kill everybody.
Look at the bright side, that's the bright side. Well that's the dark side of a bright side of the sun. I guess, But I mean, you say it won't kill humanity. But that's sort of as far as we know right, just because we haven't seen a solar flare or coronal mass ejection big enough. But is it possible that in the future you could have like a giant sunburp that does maybe wipe out half of the Earth.
It's definitely possible, And we actually see that kind of stuff happening in other stars, like our neighboring star Proximus Centauri in twenty nineteen, it's suddenly got a lot brighter than normal, like fourteen thousand times brighter than usual, so it was like really intensely bright. Like if you are on an earth like planet around Proximus Centauri at that time, then any water molecule would have gotten like split by the radiation. It's really got scorched.
Like the whole stargut brighter, not just like a little burp on it.
Yes, the whole stargut brighter, and you know, that's a different kind of star than ours. It's a red dwarf star, which are known to be more volatile and have these like big upswings and down swings in radiation. So it's possible, though, that the same kind of thing could happen to the Sun. We don't see evidence of that in the historical record dating back tens and thousands of years, but it is possible. We don't understand the Sun very well, and the time scales we're talking about are very long, and so it's certainly as possible as the Sun could surprise us.
Yeah, it's still a relatively young sun, right, Like, it's not in its senior year.
It's in its middle age of about it's like five billion years old, and we expect it's going to last to be about ten billion, so you know, it's halfway there. It's thinking about buying a sports car.
Hey, yeah, it could still have some spunk to it, or unpredictability or some midlife crisis exactly. All right, Well, again another reminder of how precarious we sit in this little rock in the middle of space. Stuff can come at us out of the blue or out of the sun.
It's amazing that we've been comfortable and cozy long enough to develop as much of an understanding about the universe that we have, one that shows us exactly how precarious and crazy our situation is. And hopefully we can sit here staring out into the universe understanding more and more about how it might kill us.
And also, I think a pretty good reminder also of how important science is and how important it is to understand these things, because you know, we can have some warning about something that's coming our way. It would be good to know, right, so we can protect things and shield ourselves and turn off our phones just in time.
That's right. More than just understanding why we are dying, it might actually prevent it so that we can arrest easy and keep checking Twitter. That's right at the beach, reading papers and getting a nice tan. All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US Dairy t hackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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Guess what Will What's that Mago. I've been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part Time Genius. But even though we've done over two hundred and fifty episodes, we don't really talk about murderers or cults.
I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy. We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food? And how do dollar stores make money? And then of course can you game a dog show? So what you're saying is everyone should be listening. Listen to Part Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts
