Space Weather - What's That?!

Published Jan 5, 2021, 10:00 AM

Did you know space has weather? It’s true! In our solar system, tons – literal tons – of highly charged gas and magnetized particles spew from the surface constantly, causing all sorts of weird stuff here on Earth. So far, nothing too bad has happened.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck, Brian over there, and Jerry's not here. But we're going to make it through somehow, uh, in this edition of Stuff You Should Know. Um, I'm going to call this one Chuck the Icarus Edition, because we made it through the Sun Podcast just hanging on by our fingernails before and through just an astounding act of hubris. We're going to do another Sun related episode. Yeah. We talked about a lot of this stuff in the Sun one. Yeah we did, but I don't think we went anywhere near into this kind of detail. So I'm feeling okay about redoing this, doing something that that's like kind of a re redo a little bit. Okay, are you feeling okay? I'm feeling great. Oh good, I'm glad to hear that. I don't know if I would say I'm feeling great, but that's good that you are at least so. Um, we're talking about the Sun, believe it or not, and we're talking about a specific thing on the Sun called solar flares, which you may have heard of, but you may not know much about unless apparently you've already listened to our Sun episode. But um, we'll talk a little bit about solar flawers. But one of the things that that I think is extraordinarily interesting about solar flowers is they belong to a larger category called space weather. And I am just as jazz as can be about the idea of space weather, aren't you? Uh not as jazz as you, I don't think, but I do think this is this is pretty neat stuff, and I'm glad we're we're getting a chance to make it more clear than we did before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a good that's a good point. I'm sure we talked about this before, but it's probably extremely confusing. So yeah, we're going to clear all that up. So space weather, especially stuff that comes from the Sun, come mostly from the surface or the atmosphere of the Sun, which is extraordinarily active. It's extraordinarily hot, so hot, chuck. Um that the surface of the Sun is made of plasma, which a lot of people consider the fourth state of matter. It's like a gas, but it's a special kind of gas that um where the particles are as jazzed about being alive as I am about the idea of space weather. That's right. They're supercharged and when they are moving around, they create something called metic magnetic fields. Not the band, the thing, even though it is a great band name and a great band. Uh, and they are gonna you know, magnetic fields have their own effect on all these particles and what's going on in there. Yeah. So the the energetic electrons that have been stripped from the atoms, creating electrons and ions which have a charge, they create magnetic fields, and then the magnetic fields they create have an effect on them, um so that they tend to follow these magnetic field lines. But the the stuff is so energetic and so hot that the magnetic fields that develop aren't like this kind of orderly lines that keep their distance, you know, nice and tidy like you imagine like a magnetic field to exist. Like these things are like roiling, curling, twisting. It's just a big orgy of magnetism up there. That's the only way to put it. That's it. I had no choice but to say it like that. Yeah, and then, uh, you know, this stuff is going on. It's called solar activity, and it depends on when you're observing the Sun, it's going to be more or less active. There's a there's a cycle, it's called the solar cycle that happens about every eleven years when the magnetic north and south pole switch. And within that cycle, UM, there's something called a solar maximum, which is the period kind of where the biggest show is going on. Yeah, there's also a solar minimum, but the solar maximum is UM. We're in solar cycle twenty five apparently, and the solar maximum is coming up on in two thousand. That's very appropriately UM. And so as we're reaching the solar maximum, there's gonna be a lot more of what people call sun spots. By people, I mean astronomers, of course, um. And sun spots are these kind of darkish areas on the surface of the Sun. They can be little, tiny dots, they can be kind of big, but they look really really small and they look dark. UM. And the reason they look dark is because they're relatively cool compared to the rest of the surface that's around them. Um. But even still, they're super duper hot and they're still pretty bright comparatively speaking. Yeah, Like a sun spot is about degrees fahrenheit. Because we're talking about the sun so cool is a relative term here. Uh. And as far as bright goes, it's about that's about ten times as bright as a full moon. So if you go out at night in a full moon and it kind of feels like a little cool daylight, a sun spot is about ten times brighter than that. Right, So you shouldn't go looking at these things. No, No, that's a really good thing to say. Is like, we're talking about a lot of stuff that's gonna make you want to look at the sun. Don't do it. Just go online and look at pictures of this stuff on the sun or videos even we have videos thanks to the good people at NASA, but um, the sun spots, So it really just goes to show you how hot and bright the surface of the Sun is. That these things seem cool and dark by comparisons. And yeah, and they are really really big, So the width of them can get to be up to thirty thous miles across, which is about the width of Neptune, which is huge, about four times the width of Earth. Um, and still they look super dinky compared to the Sun. And the reason that these things are cooler, chuck, is because they're spots of magnetism that are so strong that they keep the heat inside the Sun from poking out right there. That's how strong the magnetic energy is in these areas. Yeah, and that's right. And because they're magnets, they form in little pairs like little buddies, and they appear on the surface of the Sun. And what we're actually looking at if you can like go to uh NASA or whatever, like you said, and see a picture of a sun spot, what you're looking at is sort of like the two ends of um. If you think about these magnetic lines there, these magnetism it's like a filament like a rope. Just picture them twisted up basically running beneath the sun surface. And there are some really really cool pictures and stuff. And then one end of this sun spot is positive, the other end is negative, and it's they sort of act like rings of a tree a little bit. As far as astronomers can like observe these things. The first sun spots of each cycle are in the midd latitudes and then they start moving around during the cycle, so they can kind of see where you are in the solar cycle by where and how many of these sun spots there are. Yeah, so the more the closer to the solar maximum you are, the more sun spots they're going to be, and the closer they're going to be to the equator. So they tell a lot about where where the Sun is in its solar cycle. Um. But the thing is when these magnetic field lines twists and and curve and turn, um, they actually can interact with other magnetic field lines. And when that happens, when they cross, kind of like the proton streams crossing in Ghostbusters. When that happens, UM, something called the solar flare, uh happens. It's a it's an event on the Sun, and it is such a huge, magnificently energetic event that it actually can affect Earth things on Earth because it's just so massive in such a huge release and sudden release of energy. I had a Ghostbusters ref penciled end later on if you believe that. Oh, I can't wait to it's been a long time, when we both have to we have one each. Um, Yeah, it has. And it's been a while since we listed dates by the years before since Ghostbusters came in. Mind has a data attached to it, and you'll just have to wait. I can't wait. What a great episode this is shaping out to be. So these explosions, the magnetic fields are driving these explosions. And if you you know, if you're lay people like us, it's you can either look at this is something that's kind of simple to look at on its surface, or if you really want to get into it, it's pretty complex and not easily understood. But the simple answer is, because we're talking about magnetic fields, is that these adjacent fields are pointing in opposite directions and they basically wipe each other out and that releases all this magnetic energy and all that heat, uh, kind of everywhere that surrounds it. It just goes spew spew, spew energy heat shooting at you from the sun. Right, So people have figured this out. Finally that has to do with, like um, the lines of magnetism interacting with one another and annihilating one another. But there's a big mystery attached to this, or there there was for many many years, and that is that. Okay, so we understand magnetic annihilation. But to this point, we thought it took about ten thousand years for two opposite magnetic fields to annihilate one another. Well, we're talking about here, these solar flares. They they annihilate one another and release all this energy in a matter of minutes, maybe an hour sometimes, So that doesn't quite job. And I think back in the fifties some scientists started proposing a type of magnetic energy released called magnetic reconnection. And that is where magnetic field lines are so um twisty, turney writhey and energetic that they can actually rip a field line or like a magnetic field line can rip a part and then reconnect with some neighbors. When that happens, it's called magnetic reconnection. And they think that that is the kind of energetic release that would account for a solar flare. Yeah, and this, you know, this can cause all kinds of problems, um for things in space and for people on Earth even which we'll get to that stuff in more detail a little bit later. But the point is these things are super hot. Uh. They burst out to the Sun's corona, which, if you remember from our Sun Up episode, that's the outermost atmosphere of the Sun. Rarefied gas is all over the place out there, and it has I mean, this is super super hot stuff. Like normally the temperature and the corona is about you know, a few million degrees kelvin, but inside that flare, we're talking ten to twenty million degrees kelvin. And we always like to uh think of things in terms of either big max or hydrogen bombs, and in this case, it's got to be hydrogen bombs. The amount of energy released during a solar flare is about um it's millions of one hundred ton hydrogen bombs all at once. Yeah, all at once. That's a really that's a really important point too, you know, And I feel like a real schmo for not having calculated that in big bags calories. I know you could do calories, yeah, but what's the calorie of a solar flare. I don't know. I didn't look and I feel like a jackass for not having looked. Well, they go down easy, I know that they do. So they're big, huge releases of energy, and they're they're releases of radiation. They release um radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum and that includes the visible light spectrum. So these things just turned into these enormously bright flares, which is where the name comes from. And we've figured out how to classify, and there's a classifying system for solar flares. It's a lot like the Richter scale UM, and that there's class A, B, C, M, and X. That's not really like the Richter scale. What's like the Richter scale is that each of those classes UH is ten times more powerful than the previous class. Yeah, so like an X is the highest, that is ten times ten times in M, a hundred times of C. And then once you get to X, uh. You know, if they didn't go Y and Z, they just said, let's stick with X and then let's cool. Sure, and it sounds totally cool, and then let's start attaching numbers to them so you can have you know, X, one, three, four and so on. Yeah, and so you know, each each of those letter grades has a one through nine scale, but X is so huge the excess scale goes beyond nine. And I think the biggest, the biggest one that they've ever caught so far, UM that's ever been recorded. UH burned out the set answers that were recording it, and the censors UM were overloaded at X eight And they did some calculations after the fact and they figured out that they may have been an X forty five flare. Back on November four, two thousand three. Yeah, this was a big deal. This was it was something called the Halloween Storms of two thousand three, which is kind of a fun way. Uh, you know, it happened because it was in October and near Halloween. So while the astronomers got excited. And this one was a little bit weird because although it was near the solar maximum, it was two to three years after the peak, and it was they said, NASA said it's generally a quiet period, so they got really really excited. There were seventeen major flares in that uh Halloween storm, and it was that's something that is really going to get the white coats pretty charged up. It totally is I mean an X forty five that's just funding And I did a little bit of of derivative calculation. Technically it would be a double A five A five, you know. I saw weird different numbers too, though. I saw that the center cut out at fifteen and the estimate was X. Huh. It's really hard. It's NASSY even had conflicting information. I think we should point this out that you just set us up for a c o A that I wanted to include. So there's two things. Um, there's a lot of disagreement on exactly what a solar flare is and the difference between that and coronal mass ejections, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And it's not necessarily a disagreement in astronomy, um. It's a disagreement among people who report on stuff like astronomy and don't fully understand what they're talking about. So we ran into that quite a bit. So if we get something mixed up, please forgive us. And then secondly, when we're talking about some of these incredible um events in physics terms, people who are in the field of physics understand what they're talking about to one another, but they have a great reputation of not figuring out how to explain it to the rest of us, and so they'll put it in different terms. And so when you're researching this stuff, you're like, are you is this describing a different thing than this over here or is it just two different people describing the same thing two different ways because they're not describing it in the true physics way because I wouldn't understand. So we ran into that a lot too, did you. Yeah, And it's frustrating to literally see two different things both from NASA dot gov on two different pages. But you know, who are we too to call out NASA? I think we just did. We'll call out Space Force, sure. But the point is this, all of that really underscores the fact that our understanding of the dynamics on the Sun are still really early and premature, um, and we're still figuring a lot of stuff out, including classifying the differences between solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Yeah, and the light show and the you know, the fund that the astronomers had in the Halloween storms of two thousand three was immense, no matter whether it was x X forty partied either way, they did they surely did check. They had a little bit of peach snops and went to tasted some half a shot of brandy and then went to bed. That's right. Prove us wrong, nerds, prove us wrong. I say, we take a break and then come back and talk about those coronal mass ejections that I teased. Okay, we'll be right back, everybody, m all right. So I was saying that it's difficult sometimes to discern the difference between a solar flare, which is a huge burst of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum um all at once, which, by the way, it takes just a matter of minutes eight minutes to be exact to reach Earth because we're talking about carriers of the electromagnetic force, which can travel at the speed of light. So it's where I guess, eight minutes, but at the speed of light from the Sun, right. Um. Coronal mass ejections are something different. Even though they seem to be associated with solar flares in a lot of cases, they also seem to be able to kind of stand on their own too. Either way, they're impressive in their own right for sure. Yeah, I mean, I think if you were talking in terms of um visual excitement, like a solar mass I'm sorry, a coronal mass ejection is like a full on Grateful Dead concert, whereas a solar flair is like when John Mayer played with members of the Grateful Dead. Oh that's mean I was gonna say it was. It's just an Instagram video lesson of John Mayor teaching you some Grateful Dead lick because you know well, but sol solar flares are more magnificent than that. Um, so man, that's mean. Sorry, Sorry, John Mayor. If you're listening. I'm not sorry, Josh. Sorry. He uh he's a nice guy, he apparently, uh has I've seen some stuff like of him teaching like people how to play Grateful Dead guitar stuff and it's really really hard what he's doing. So my hats off, right, So with man, I feel weird. It just apologized to John Mayer on the stuff you should know ast about solar flares. You didn't see that coming. No, it wasn't in my notes. So with coronal mass ejections at least these these are not necessarily just bursts of um of radiation like a solar flare is these they do have some radiation attached, but they're big thing is um particles, highly charged, super energetic particles that it shoots like buckshot towards the Earth at incredible speeds. I mean, they get they get accelerated very close to the speed of light, not the speed of light, and there's a big difference between the speed of light and close to the speed of light. So it takes about three or four days usually for stuff um that's shot out by a coronal mass ejection to reach Earth. But when these things go off on the Sun, there like you said, they're they're rather impressive. Yeah, like if you were looking at this stuff and uh with a telescope and high powered telescope that is I don't I don't think you could well could you see any of this stuff anything you have at home? You know, I've got a pretty good telescope, but it's for nighttime viewing only. So with the UM, I think you can see coronal mass ejections. I think solar flares. You're you're best with a radio telescope or X ray telescope, but the X ray telescope would have to be outside of Earth's magnetosphere. Do you have a telescope, yeah, telescope. It's not a radio telescope. No, no no, no, I just we've never talked, we've never scoped it up in conversation, and I would be surprised if you didn't, but I'm glad to know you do. We do have one. Yea so flares, Like if you were looking through an X ray or a radio telescope at a solar flare, it'll look cool, It'll look like a flash of light. But those coronal mass ejections are really impressive, big eruptions. Uh, the height can be many times the size of the Earth, shooting out into space, like you said, and they're they're kind of like a belch from the Sun that actually releases part of the Sun. It's like a bubble of plasma that's just an enormous um often billions and billions of tons uh in mass, just coming right at the Earth, full of these incredibly charged particles UM. And they're so big, so massive, and the plasma that they're made of is so energetic that they actually have their own magnetic fields like the sawn or the Earth UM. So when they finally do come in contact with the planet, our planet UM, weird things start to happen because it's own magnetic field and all of the charged particles within the plasma contact our own magnetosphere and then also our atmosphere UM, which is almost designed to UM to deter the worst effects of those things coming at us from the Sun. Yeah, so our magnetosphere, that's our little first layer of protection. That would be like UM, although I was about to say like Wakonda's protective shield, that may be more like the ionosphere. But the magnetosphere is that first protect and and it's going to kind of brush away as many of those charge particles, these protons that are shooting out as possible, and because of solar wind though, uh, it's it's it's got a shape to it. The magnetosphere has like a sort of a compressed side that faces the Sun. It's got a little dip near the poles of the Earth where some really magnificent stuff is going to take place, as we'll see in a minute. And then it's got this tail end that flows out from the back, and the Earth's magnetic field is going to block these particles from most of the surface. The Sun's the solar wind is going to push them along toward that tail and then that dip at the poles is where you're gonna see these really brilliant auroras. Yes, but the magnetism, the magnetic energy from the coronal mass ejection can be so energetic that it can actually push on the sun side, the day side of the Earth's magnetosphere it's closest to the Sun, push on it so much that it actually contorts the Night's the tail end that trails off into space and presses it together so that when it comes together the Earth's own magnetosphere um becomes energetic and quivery and then when it goes back to its normal energy state, it releases a bunch of energy in the form of light. And when that happens, the auroras that tend to congregated the polls can actually show up all over the planet basically, even very close to the equator. Yeah, which is crazy. And we'll talk about some of the bigger ones and some of the surprising places they showed up. But um, so that's a magnetosphere. I mentioned the ionosphere. That's sort of um, I guess the secondary protection that is another high layer of the Earth's atmosphere, and that's going to stop all the radiation because it's giving out a tremendous amount of radiation. And if the ionosphere wasn't doing his job and it wasn't there, we would be in big, big trouble. Oh yeah, we we'd be toast. I mean, like, these are incredibly energetic, fast traveling particles close to the speed of light um and they would just shoot right through the tissue in our our bodies, uh and do all sorts of damage because they would probably knock all sorts of electrons off of our atoms that make up our cells and our tissue and um, we would either develop cancer of the long term or just drop dead from a big enough dose of the stuff. So thank goodness for the ionosphere. I mean, it saves us like John Mayor saved the grateful dead. Just in case he's still listening. There's like a percentage of our audience it's like, yeah, man, preach, and there's a percentage that was like, oh my god, I have to turn this off. And then I'd say the vast majority are like American exactly, the guy that dated Jen Aniston probably. Um. So you've got the magnanosphere, you got the ionosphere, and for the most part, these things are capable of absorbing the worst of the on belches and flare ups and everything, um, under normal circumstances. But even even when it is protecting life on Earth like us animals and the plants and the plankton and you know, um, the whales, that kind of stuff life here on Earth. Um, there are things that we humans have developed that can be affected by these this space weather, by these geomagnetic storms. Yeah, I guess should we talk about the the Carrington event one of the most exciting events. I thought it was pretty exciting. Yes, it's pretty good. So, uh, this is eighteen fifty nine. Um, like this kind of thing now is pretty magnificent, But I imagine eighteen fifty nine astronomers were just really really knocked out by something like this. They said, zeus is beer exactly. Uh. This is sort of late summer August September and a big solar storm they later called the Carrington event became him the strongest one on record. And this is named for a man named Richard Carrington. He was an astronomer, one of England's best at the time, and he was in his observatory and he was hanging out and it was a sunny day and he was working with his telescope and he's projecting this image of the sun on a screen and drawing. He there were cameras at the time, but I guess the most I don't know, accurate or efficient way to capture what he saw was to draw this stuff that he's observing, and that's what he was doing on September one. Yeah, and while he was drawing the stuff, um, he saw that some of these sun spots that he was he was um mapping, I guess, started to grow really really bright and he got really excited because he'd been doing this for a while and this wasn't something he'd seen before. So he jumped up and he ran to get a friend who was going to witness this mistake. Yeah, he said. He was gone for a minute tops. When he came back, he found that these brilliant flashes of light had already started to like weakend. Can you imagine. He was a little bummed about this, but he and he and his buddy still watched these flares like go, you know, get lower and lower and then turn into pinpoints and then vanish. Um. So what he saw he was the first person to record a solar flare. No one had ever seen anything like it before. And that was at eleven three am. It was, it was done, It finished, um and then nothing. That was it until the wee hours of the morning, later that night, the morning of the next day, later that night, which I always just find endlessly confusing. What that it took that long? No that it's the next that night is the next morning. For some reason, it just breaks my brain every time. I realized how sad that is to admit. Yeah, so in the wee hours, the skies put on a light show all over the earth redan purple auroras, very brilliant, very exciting newspapers. You could like read the newspaper at night. They saw this stuff in the Hawaii El Salvador and the Bahamas. They saw the auroras in the boat that nuts. That is nuts. Uh. There were towns neighboring towns that thought the that like Shelbyville was on fire, Springfield thought Shelby Bill was on fire, and vice versa. There were birds chirping, they thought because they thought it was dawn. Uh. There was a brick mason crew in South Carolina that got up in you know, they were like two beers in going to work when they realized that, hey, it's the middle of the night. And they looked at each other and said, man, this is a hundred and twenty five years before Ghostbusters. Oh nice, very nice. Check. Yeah, well it seemed canned in because I prem, yeah, well i'll tell you what, how about this. I'm gonna give you a huge hearty surprise laugh. And I hinted out the conversation before all right ready, And they all looked at each other, two beers in, and said Ghostbusters won't even come out for another hundred twenty five years. What. Oh my god, I did not see that coming. Dude, how long has it been since we talked about I don't know. That's perfect and we'll just fix that all on editing. That's great, thanks, Chuck. I need a I need a couple of beers myself after them. So one of the other things, um, that really went hey wire was the telegraph system, right, because this is eighteen fifty nine, and the telegraphs were at the they were the leading edge, not bleeding edge. He's taught me that that's totally wrong, the leading edge of technology of telecommunications at the time, UM. And these telegraph lines depended on currents being sent over wires, UM. And so those wires were overloaded by this geomagnetic storm so much so that sparks were shooting off of the telegraphs. UM. Operators were getting shocked and burned. The telegraph paper was catching on fire when was nearby. It was very much like a movie. All this is happening all over the world at the same time. It's just crazy. It's like very very early morning of the next day after the Carrington event, right. So one of the things that got me was, um, they they unplugged the batteries to these things, the telegraphs, and they found that the wires were still so energetic with electricity from the geomagnetic storm that they could still send telegraphs even though they had no power of their own. They were they were able to send telegrams over the telegraph line even within it's disconnected from the batteries. That's the fact of the show to me. Oh that's amazing. Let me that. I mean, they must have thought it was haunted or something. I think, think like, sure, the plug is unplugged and it's still working. They're like Zeus's beard is crazy. There's another thing to um. Some telegraph operator couldn't send telegraphs even though the lines were active because the magnetism in these currents was so strong that the armature, the thing that they tap up and down, was like fused to the plate beneath it. It was just the magnets. The magnetism was so strong and it wouldn't move. Thought it was possessed. The probably left the room screaming. They did, says is Beard. Oh we got the third one in there. Yeah. Should we take another break? Yeah? Oh almost so. So one other thing. Let's just wrap the Carrington Event up real quick, Okay, so ten am. The effects of this whole crazy event are are done. And you know, it gets talked about. This is a worldwide event, but it's kind of like treated as a scientific anomaly, right people. People understand what happened and what caused it and why it happened. Over the years as we learned more and more about solar flares and coronal mass ejections, but it didn't become a parent that this Carrington event was actually a harbinger of like real, much bigger problems that could happen to us alive on Earth today until the seventies, and um, maybe we'll take a break, chuck, and come back and talk about how that could be problematic right after this great m hm. Alright, So the world changed a lot between the Carrington event in the mid eighteen hundreds and in the nineteen seventies when scientists had a much bigger handle on what this kind of thing meant. And in the nineteen seventies we were the whole world was very dependent on electric power. You might be surprised to learn, right, and they knew like, hey, if we had another Carrington event today, it could be a big deal because and we'll get to this later, but like, we got a lot of metal on this earth, and we use the earth to ground everything basically with ground wires, and that creates a unique problem potentially if we had another event like this. Yeah, the fact that we chose to use the earth as a ground um to where are grounding wires go from. Our electrical components tie into a metal rod that's driven into the earth, so that whenever excess electricity is generated by the electronics that we use, it gets distributed through the grounding wire to the earth where it dissipates. That makes all of our electronics vulnerable to a geomagnetic storm, because in a geomagnetic storm, the ground itself can become magnetized. And even more than that, chuck, We've buried a lot of metal infrastructure, from like pipes to um cables to all sorts of metal stuff is snaking through the ground right now, and when the ground becomes magnetized into geomagnetic storm it can create it can carry really powerful currents through all the infrastructure up through the grounds, through the grounding wires, and into our electronic components, uh including things like power transformers and overload them to the point where they fail catastrophically. Yeah. And this, uh, this sort of happened in August two there was a big, big solar flare that knocked out our long distance phone communication across Illinois. So that was just sort of an early example of like, hey, this can actually have a real effect here on Earth. UM. And that was that was a big one. It took I think about fifteen hours to hit Earth, whereas it usually to two to three days. UM. It also set off these um we had. It was during Vietnam obviously, and we had magnetic sea mines in harbors around Vietnam. It exploded those. Yeah, So I don't know if they were supposed to be like secretly there and if that was kind of like oh, whoops, sorry about that, or if they knew that they were there and and they just went off. But either way, UM, that was a pretty scary scene. It was, and apparently it was a mystery for a long time until somebody finally figured out why those sea mines all went off. They connected it to the UM, to that coronal mass ejection, I believe. Yeah, but you can imagine like all the damage uh that could occur, Like even if you're just talking about the electrical grid. If it really blew out, it wouldn't be just like a blackout, like it would destroy parts of our electrical grid such that it would take It's not like, hey, let me go out and fix this over a few hours during a snowstorm. It's it might take weeks or months or even up to a year if we had a big enough, uh like blast to the grid. Yeah, because I mean it is by necessity. Our electrical grid is interconnected. So if one part of it gets overloaded, that can overload other parts that are connected. And if you have a whole city without power, for let's say Los Angeles went went out of power for a month, what would happen? What would be the what would be the outcome of that? You couldn't do anything? And when you start thinking like that, you start thinking about, oh my god, like, think about all the stuff we do that requires electricity. Everything we do requires electricity in some form or fashion. And so to be without electricity in a major city or multiple major cities for even a couple of weeks is just unthinkable. But that's that's the level of vulnerability whereat because of the way that our electrical components are set up because they're grounded. Yeah, and and not just like a chain reaction and apocalyptic kind of activity, but um, just monetary loss, like the economic and financial damage for the city of Los Angeles to be without power for a month would be astounding. Um. So you know, there's stuff they could do. They could uh, they could fit some very critical transformers with resistors and capacitors, but these things are like hundreds of thousand dollars per transformers, So that's just too much money. So they're not doing that. No, they're not. And I wonder if there's going to be like some close call that makes everybody Okay, we need to invest this in our infrastructure, or you know, are we going to figure out some other means of you know, a backup system. I'm not sure that happens to like Topeka. And then everyone says, hey, if this happened in Topeka and they lost you know, several hundred dollars, and that's really mean how it's gonna say? Did you think do you think Topeka would do it? Do you think that would convince anybody? I don't know. I'm so sorry Topeka, but you get my point. If it happens somewhere sort of in a smaller area than the big cities. Might say, Hey, that means it could happen to us, the people who really matter, right, the coastal elites would stroke their beards and struck their tongues. Yeah so, um so yeah, there's there doesn't seem to be a lot of initiative right now to figure this out, and we're just kind of sitting ducks in a weird way. It's nothing. I don't think it's anything to lose sleepover. But it's really surprising. Like the more I dug into this, the more I was like, huh, this could kind of be a thing someday. And it's not just you know, the electrical grid uh here on Earth alone is what is all that would be affected by that? There um, things we rely on out in space, like satellites a bad enough to you, a magnetic storm could affect satellites and a out of weights, so our GPS systems would be messed up. Or if you, um so, if you use GPS for really important stuff like say landing an airplane, you could be in big trouble. Um and if you're also on planes, the high frequency radio communications they used to stay in contact with the ground, especially when they're out over the ocean or something like that. UM, that can be disrupted by a solar flare or a chronal mass ejection too. Yeah, or what about a satellite maybe that is I mean, there are thousands of satellites up there, but and you know, if a radio satellite went out, it would be bad, but people could live. But what if it affected a satellite that's UM in charge of aiding in national defense. Things could get a little bit scary if those satellites were down or you know, spacecraft, their spacecraft up there and they use satellites to help orient themselves and and keep themselves safe. Uh, there's an I S S. Although the ice supposedly is UH is protected right yeah, oh yeah. The the big threat to UM astronauts from coronal mass ejections and solar flares is when they're out on spacewalks, when they're doing like labor, say outside the I S S or something like that. UM. Just like here on Earth, if we didn't have the ionosphere of the magnetosphere, UM, we would be in big trouble. Astronauts can be in big trouble. The I S s orbits within the Earth's magnetosphere, but it's beyond the ionop so they are a little more exposed. On the I S S. It's shielded, so they're not nearly as exposed. But out on a spacewalk they if it were a really bad chronal mass ejection, they could be in a lot of trouble. Um like Sandra her face in that movie exactly. Uh, what is your last name? I can't remember, sandraw Burning, Sandra Bullo, Sandra, Sandy Duncan, Sandra Bullock. Yeah, Sandra Bernhard in that movie Space Space trit Space Craziness. Did you like that movie Gravity? Uh? Yeah, I thought it was pretty good if I've only seen it once. Um, I don't I don't know if I would have cast her necessarily, but it's fine. Or George Cleaning, I don't think I would have cast either of him. I mean I had some issues. I mean it was a magnificent looking movie, but I think in the end I had some issues with the story in the script being like not good enough for how great of a movie it was trumped up to be. Did Um was that the by the guy who did The Revenant? I think so? Yeah, So you and I went and saw The Revenant in Hawaii Wants when we were on vacation, because what else is there to do in Hawaii on vacation but go see movies. And um, we saw The Revenant and this person next to us was there by by himself, and he was so upset um by Tom Hardy's character and just how evil he was that this guy was like telling him he was the dead of all. He had his hand up at the screen and was praying against Tom Hardy. He was really affected by Tom Hardy's character, which made the movie like even more thrilling because we would look at the movie and then we watch this person reacting to the movie too, So it was something something to see. Yeah, I saw that once as well, and I saw it on tour with you. Either it was either Phoenix or San Diego. I don't would have to look at the dates, but I just remember there being palm trees. I think it was San Diego. Maybe when we did a show at that spooky abandoned church, man, I'm convinced still to this day that that's the church from the Prince of Darkness that John Carton. That was a weird show because that was the one I know. You remember that guy sat on the front row and shot the whole thing with a video camera and he looked like he was mad too, like he was documenting evidence or something to use against us. We both were like, I think we were so caught off guard. We didn't know what to say. Do we call this guy and say, sir, can you please put away your camera? So we just soldiered on. Yeah, we were pinned down by the unrelenting glare of the lens. And then he went back to his apartment and showed it on TV to his roommate, who was the Tom Hardy guy, right, and that guy was like, these guys are the devil. I'm praying against them. Oh man uh alright, so yes, back to the show. Yeah, where are we? Oh, here's the deal. We're talking about astronauts and satellite operations and GPS. This isn't stuff that we have just um said, well, this probably could happen a lot of it is, but um, this actually has happened. Um. We'd mentioned the thing in Illinois with the phone systems and then in um the two thousand three that c m E that did disrupt satellites and that did disrupt high frequency radio communications that aviation relies on, and that did blackout a city in Sweden. Mm hmm, mammo. Everyone says no, not mammo, yeah, mamo everybody. So this the kind of thing can happen. It does happen, it's just never happened on such a massive scale. UM. They figured out from looking at Arctic ice cores, apparently highly energetic particles leave um remnants, not revenants, remnants in nitrates frozen in the ice and at the polls and UM. By examining these cores, they can see how bad or how often or how many solar flares of hit Earth in the past. And they figured out that the Carrington event is like a five hundred years solar flare, and it happened about a hundred and seventy years ago. Hopefully we're in the clear. The key is we're still figuring out the dynamics of the Sun and solar activity, so we're not exactly certain that maybe we're not due for a thousand years solar flare. UM. We're just starting to figure this out, but we are figuring it out. That's step one. And we also actually have space weather forecasters here on Earth at Noah and at the National Weather Service, there are people whose job it is subtract solar activity and predict things like coronal mass ejections and solar flares so that people can, like like utility companies, can maybe take um steps to mitigate the worst effects. Eventually. I think right now we've got like eight to ten minute heads up, so that's not enough. But as we get to understand it a little more, we'll have more warning time. And you know, astronauts can plan their spacewalks when they're out doing stuff like building future space colonies. This is all going to come into play for that too. Yeah, So hopefully they can get that up to at least over an hour. That would help. Sure. So again, it's nothing to lose sleepover. That's not the point of this episode. It's more just kind of like ge whiz, this is this is amazing by Zeus Beard. I've never heard of anything like the old fourth reference. Yeahs, surprising fourth one did not see that coming. Did you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, everybody chucks that he's got nothing else. So that's it for this episode, which means it's time for listener mao. Well, let me see here. I've actually got quite a few today, which is uh an abundance. We've been getting more than usual, I haven't. Yeah, we've been getting good ones. All right, I'll choose this one. I'm gonna call it Rush Girl. Hey guys, I've been a long time listener, but you have never But I've never had a reason to write until your recent Fort Knox episode. In it you refer to the joke you had made about women not liking the Three Stooges. By the way, I got a little grief for that and also support for that. Weirdly, Chuck made the comment that it wasn't like he had something had said something true, but they're like there being no women Rush fans. I immediately laugh because my future and mother in law is the biggest Rush fan. I love this lady. She and my fiance have a bond over this band. In contrast, I thought the band was made up just for the movie I Love You Man. Wow. Yeah, Megan did not know Rush was a real band. She thought that was a fake band in a movie. Megan, you have a whole world ready to open up to you. Yes, you do. I guess that they fit the trope According to my fiance, they call female rush fans getty corns, which sounds made up, but he swears it's true getty corns. I don't get that, but like a unicorn maybe, oh yeah, exactly, or or it could be candy corn. No, no, I'm sure it's like the Getty Getty Lee unicorn mash up. I like that. I didn't get that until just now, so thank you. At any rate, I can recognize the joke, and I'm not coming after you for that. I just found it funny that all the stereotypical male bands you could have picked, you chose my mother in law's favorite. Thanks for all you do. Your podcast has gone a long way toward helping me distress after a day of teaching during COVID. And that is from Megan Power and Megan, thank you, and big ups to your mother in law for being a getty corn. Yeah, not to be confused with candy corn. Well, if you want to be like Megan and let us know how we just totally blew your mind somehow or other. We love hearing that stuff. You can put it in an email and wrap it up spanking on the bottom and send it off to stuff podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

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