the sun (nearby star not hate-filled newspaper): classic or dud

uh oh

Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy: BREAKING: The sun just had a violent eruption of plasma on the Western limb. This flung material hundreds of thousands of miles into space. An incredible sight. This photo was captured just 10 minutes ago using my modified solar telescope.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GDgtCuQaIAAQZKD?format=jpg
(from two days ago)

it's reaching the peak of solar maximum in 2025 "NASA predicts that a large solar flare will hit Earth sometime in 2025". Start prepping!

sunscreen SPF one million

I'll try to remember my umbrella

Apparently a solar flare like the one in the 1850s would cause half the electrical systems in the world to go down or something, that’d be a fun few months

I used to think perhaps one of these solar storms could wipe out the bank's data centre and reset my overdraft, but this seems a bit hopeful, maybe I should join a Sun God cult. The storm of 1859 caused telegraph cables to burn, I haven't got a clue if modern surge protection would prevent widescale damage to electrical grids if it happened again. They can withstand lighting strikes but geomagnetic storms are another thing. I'm just guessing here but I'd imagine magnetically induced currents are going to occur over a huge area of the grid so can't be as easily diverted than individual lighting strikes can. The price of copper is going to go mental again!

i think i posted a very extremely wrong explanation of how magnets work a few months back so take this for what it is (= ICP-ass science): but i believe that magnetic fields cannot be blocked or shielded against

in conclusion: wins's prophecy is totally being fulfilled in the (very) near future

positive: might get time off work
negative: probably won't be able to spend that time on the Playstation

xp It also gave telegraph operators electrical shocks and threw line workers to the ground.

And the wichita linesman is still there

Dud. What has the sun ever done for us?

who loves the sun?

Some operators were able to continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies

never knew the sun had a western limb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-inft-v3mI0

It's a pretty average star.

there was an American hippy guy who took some lsd and whilst tripping he stared at the sun for 20 minutes without it burning a permanent dot into his retinal tissue. He took this as proof that stars have self-awareness and what he experienced was a conversation with our sun. Then years later he wrote a book about how stars are gods. I did encounter this hippy when I lived in London in the 90's - he was a total arse! The boring answer is, no they are formed from gas and dust you daft pillock. But his argument probably would be so are humans. I looked him up on youtube and he was saying that because when scientists fire up a photon emitter they can't predict where a photon will land, proof that there is free will, even at a subatomic level. In short: this fool is full of it, and has probably been staring at a permanent dot for the last 60 years.

but he's happy, maybe

I can confirm another ilxer has met this guy and she posted he was an asshole as well, so I'm not being unreasonably ungenerous here!

I mean he's rich and full of shit - so yeah he is probably very happy.

i was saying that in my sarkiest voice, certainly wouldn't wanna get stuck anywhere with this guy chewing my ear off

quantum free will definitely one of those convos you don't want to get into with 99.9% of people who start it

Is he by any chance an anti-vaxxer too?

don't know about that but he also wrote another book about how we don't need governments, which coming from a rich Californian boomer hippy guy living in a big posh house in West London, well no thanks m8

these are my truths what are yours:
i: stars are gods
ii: gods are bad not good so fvck em
iii: if chatty it's a nearby imp pranking you you goofball

cloudy days >>>> sunny days

A hippy who is a total arse? Don't believe it.

there was an American hippy guy who took some lsd and whilst tripping he stared at the sun for 20 minutes without it burning a permanent dot into his retinal tissue. He took this as proof that stars have self-awareness and what he experienced was a conversation with our sun.

Look I've stared at brick walls for longer than that and without the benefit of psychedelics, didn't make me think the fucking thing was intelligent. Wealth = inoculation aganist common sense.

Oops meant to quote that not strike it out, works quite well though

tbf I feel like striking out 99% of the shite I post!

BTW, retinal burns do heal after a while.

During the build up to the '99 eclipse someone on UK tv said if you stare at this event without eye protection, there is a serious risk that you'll be seeing it for the rest of your life. I looked directly at it and suffered no long term damage. Bloody nanny state!

"It's a pretty average star."

the solar system isn't average though, according to kepler. Most of them seem to have "super-earths" in the goldilocks zone or hot gas giants much closer to the sun, some as close as Mercury are. Step forward "wandering Jupiter" theory which put a stop to super earth development then got pulled back by Saturn.

rad, had not heard of that

I'd like to know the exact date of the impending solar flare so I can make sure to unplug my laptop first...

lol better get a Faraday Cage for that thing just to be safe

an airplane is a flying Faraday Cage is it not? safe as houses!

A Faraday cage; that's the ticket.
I predict booming sales for Faraday cages...

you have to buy a huge hv tesla coil as well to test its integrity

haha

working in the solar industry I have at least one conversation a month with a Faraday Cage nutjob

Then years later he wrote a book about how stars are gods

An argument could be made that Sun God worship is the only one that really makes any sense (I guess moon worship in hotter climates as well)... its energy is responsible for every living thing on earth except for some weird barnacles and shrimp that live near vents in the bottom of the sea

i also enjoy the work of fash maniac Georges Bataille

Apparently a solar flare like the one in the 1850s would cause half the electrical systems in the world to go down or something, that’d be a fun few months.

Severe space weather event is one of the highest ranked events in the UK national risk register which is a fun read.

understanding the finiteness of stars and that they are just basically a process playing out for billions of years doesn't diminish any sense awe of them I have, but mainly it's just a sense of awe at how big they are and the crazy shit that happens towards the end of that process. But they are just basic big bastards, I'm kind of against worshipping them without trying to judge those that do - well apart from the tool I mentioned on this thread!

the vast scale of universal machinations is of great comfort to me tbh

xp Chimps do ritual dances when they are confronted by large amounts of rushing water (waterfalls, rainstorms, etc). Water--the source of all life on Earth--seems to be another sane thing to worship.

If the sun is so sentient I challenge it to prove it to all of us with a sign of some sort

microbes do this all the time to me but i DISDANE their tiny silly pleas and just get on with my non-microbial projects

Neutron stars are my faves, like the idea that a tablespoon of their mass would weigh a billion tons and they found one that spins 716 times per second. Wild.

The magnetic field strength on the surface of neutron stars ranges from c. 104 to 1011 tesla (T).These are orders of magnitude higher than in any other object: for comparison, a continuous 16 T field has been achieved in the laboratory and is sufficient to levitate a living frog due to diamagnetic levitation.

does it increase linear or exponentially im trying to figure out how many frogs a good neutron star would lift

footage of that living frog today:
https://annoyingthing.net/images/thumb/e/eb/Crazy_Frog_Standing.png/600px-Crazy_Frog_Standing.png

Hold on did they actually levitate a frog or is it all theoretical? I need footage if so

"living frog" is the standard unit of measurement for things levitated, as “size of wales“ is for areas of deforestation

A kilonova was found in the long gamma-ray burst GRB 211211A, discovered in December 2021 by Swift's Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) and the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM). This discovery challenges the prevailing theory that long GRBs exclusively come from supernovae, the end-of-life explosions of massive stars.

To get a picture of this rarity, throughout the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, scientists have thus far only found one potential kilonova progenitor system, CPD-29 2176, which is located about 11,400 light-years from Earth.

this is pretty mad, a couple of years ago there was a confirmed kilonova sighting (when two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole merge). No frogs were pummelled into ribbons or levitated by gravitational waves during this cosmic event. Sort of makes me glad we don't live in a binary system, two suns would really suck.

the solar system isn't average though, according to kepler.

― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino)

yeah kepler would fuckin' say that

fookin so-called "Kepler space telescope" solar system exceptionalism needs stamping out!

I've read more than once that the sun has roughly the same energy output per unit weight as a compost pile - e.g. https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.htm . Doubtless better minds than mine have worked this out, but if it's true how come the temperature of the sun is anywhere from 100 to 300,000 times hotter than a compost pile?

is the difference here that compost pile energy isn't nuclear fusion? although it might be if you are living in remote parts of the former USSR

was reading about brown dwarfs the other day, sort of sun-fails, almost planets, that burn out much slower than our sun. Some of them in small binary systems and some rogue galactic wanderers iirc

i don't know what the relationship between temperature and energy is but naively i want to say higher temperature = more energy, regardless of how it was produced. caek where are you.

this is purely guesswork (A in physics-with-chemistry o-level in i believe 1976) but most obvious differences are:
i: how the energy generated per unit weight is being dispersed
ii: the volume to surface area ratio
iii: the limits on the amount of material feeding into the energy out
iv: internal convection

i: a compost pile is largely convection into the atmosphere, the sun is radiation into space (but no idea which trumps which in units)
ii: the sun has a smaller surface area to volume ratio, hence will *disperse* less energy-to-volume as a proportion?
(caveat convection only goes upwards so the relevant compost-heap surface area doesn't include the base of the heap but even so this holds bcz the sun is so very big)
iii: compost heap consumes all its grass clippings long before the heat reaches fusion levels
iv: basically inside the sun (as opposed to on its surface) energy aka heat is transmitted by convection to its immediate neighbouring region, so it heats itself up much more than its surroundings -- a composite heap has far less internal convection (hence the surface is usually fairly cool even when the inside is squishily toasty)

if you formed a compost heap as large as the sun it would become extremely hot inside! however i think the heat from chemical reaction would soon be supplanted by the heat from fusion etc

adding: hydrogen and helium allow for relatively thermal conductivity (yes i had to look this up) so the heat is moving round *inside* the sun by convection AND conduction: i couldn't get a conductivity reading for grass clippings but i'm guessing it's lower

however if it were higher, compost heaps would i guess cool down even more quickly lol (so this is a difference that works a little bit in the opposite direction)

whats the density of each quick someone

the simple answer is the sun is nuff big + has got bare heat

literally no one knows the density of a compost heap

the outer mass of the sun is so low density if you were some invincible space deity who is impervious to extreme radiation, gravity and heat you could probably fly right into it until you hit the core which I'd guess would have a higher density to anything on earth, inc myself or other resident dung heaps.

the compost pile energy output per unit volume is apparently true. the reason the sun puts out more energy than a compost pile is that it's much bigger than a compost pile. you won't believe how much bigger.

the other way in which the sun is more energetic than the compost pile is the sun generates energy for 10bn years. the compost pile does not.

I know the sun is big :) alsoI know energy does not directly correlate to temperature - you could calculate how much energy it would take to raise the temperature of a given mass of a given substance - (and I know Watts are a unit of power not energy) but I want to say that a given mass at 5000-15000000 degrees will output more energy than the same mass at 60 degrees. Why not?

i want to know what is wrong with my various elements of an answer

yes that's certainly true.

total radiant energy emitted by a square meter surface of a black body goes up with the fourth power of temperature.

e.g. a body at 300,000 degrees K emits one trillion times more energy than one at room temperature (about 300 degrees K).

neutron stars are much much smaller than the average yellow dwarf, yet the kinetic energy in them is immense. Not really a question - it just fucks with my head how insane they are.

mark s: the stuff about how the heat escapes (radiation vs convection, geometry, etc.) is a red herring. the sun is necessarily in energy balance. it must emits exactly energy it absorbs or generates, otherwise it would get hotter or colder.

on the credit side we have:
- energy generated by nuclear fusion (lots)
- energy absorbed from space (very small)
maybe energy released by gravitational relaxation (this is zero for the sun IIUC, but it's not zero for big gas planets)

on the debit side we have:
- energy emitted as solar radiation (lots)
- energy emitted by physically ejecting mass (small but not zero)
- energy emitted by conduction (essentially zero because space is a vacuum)

these have to add up to zero. you could make space an opaque liquid metal which would mean the sun emitted a lot of heat by conduction and it would still emit the same amount of energy.

i think i am drawing my grasp of this topic from spike milligan

officer: gad the sun is hot!
soldier: well dont touch it then

do stars not get colder over time? is "dying star" just an SF fantasy notion? (i accept that this may have negligeable bearing on ledge's question)

yes on average stars get cooler over time. but this is a very very slow process while a star is on the "main sequence" (the vast majority of its life), so it's a good approximation to say a star like the sun is in energy balance. when they run out of fuel they quickly get cooler.

https://sites.ualberta.ca/~pogosyan/teaching/ASTRO_122/lect17/6592_fig19_09a.jpg

I sill don't understand how the hydrogen fuel takes so long to be consumed, maybe I'm still not grasping the scale or maybe 9bn years isn't that long at all.

Depending on who you ask, the the sun consumes 5,000,000,000 kg of hydrogen per second.

The sun has a mass of 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.

i.e. i.e. it has enough fuel to last 100 bn years, and it is consuming about 1% of its mass every billion years. it won't last 100 bn years because it will no longer have the conditions for fusion before it runs out of fuel.

sorry that should be 600,000,000,000 kg per second.

that chart says helium flash occurs only with relatively low mass stars and I've just read that some of them can last for trillions of years!

will it last longer if we bank the ashes

the helium flash is interesting. iiuc, a star goes from being mostly hydrogen to being mostly a waste product it can do nothing with, i.e. helium. and the suddenly, right at the end it's like "oh wow i can totally fuse this helium too, let me do that real quick".

a last hurrah, it's how we all should go

or possibly first and last hurrah in this case

imma do that at my funeral and take you all with me (even if you fail to attend)

I have a sort answer, from here: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/370928 - basically the surface temperature is hotter than a compost heap because the volume to surface area ratio is higher - more power transmitted through a (relatively) smaller area. in other words caek was right it's because it's big :)

Also energy doesn't travel efficiently from the core to the surface so the 15 million temperature of the core is perhaps misleading to my intuitions.

fun fact: it takes like 5000 years for a photon to get from the middle of the sun to the surface. if it were a vacuum the same distance would take 2 seconds.

so it isn't purely gravity putting treacle in the photon's running shoes

classic