Solar minimum is here - but even now strangely beautiful auroras are dancing around the poles. Deep inside the Arctic Circle, the expert guides of Aurora Holidays in Utsjoki, Finland, can help you chase them. Book now! | | |
SOLAR MINIMUM CONDITIONS ARE IN EFFECT: The sun has been blank (no sunspots) for 26 consecutive days. This is a sign that Solar Minimum is still underway despite recent signs of life from Solar Cycle 25. During Solar Minimum, auroras are confined mainly to the Arctic. The next episode of Arctic auroras is expected on March 2-3 when a minor stream of solar wind reaches Earth.
Aurora alerts: SMS Text.
THE SURPRISING WAY SOLAR STORMS BEACH GREY WHALES: Sometimes grey whales do a funny thing. They strand themselves on beaches for no apparent reason. No injury. No illness. No obnoxious blasts from Navy sonars. They just get lost.
But why? A team of researchers from Duke University and the Adler Planetarium may have found the answer–and it’s a bit surprising. Their study was published in this week’s edition of Current Biology.
Above: A grey whale and her young. Credit: NOAA.
Biologists have long suspected that whales have an internal compass, allowing them to navigate using magnetic fields much like birds and bees do. This would make whales vulnerable to space weather. During geomagnetic storms, shifting magnetic field lines could confuse their internal compasses, throwing the whales off course.
But that’s not what the new study shows.
"We were really surprised by our results," says lead author Jesse Granger, a PhD student in Biology at Duke University. "Geomagnetic storms are not stranding the whales." Instead, the best explanation seems to be solar radio bursts.
During periods of high solar activity, the sun emits broadband bursts of radio energy. Many shortwave radio operators have been surprised by a roar of static in their headphones after a strong solar flare. Whales seem to be tuning in as well.
Above: A solar radio burst recorded on May 6, 2019, by Thomas Ashcraft. Listen!
Granger’s team looked at 35 years of grey whale stranding data compiled by NOAA. "We chose grey whales because their species has one of the longest migrations of any mammal and is a near-shore migrator — suggesting that small navigational errors increase the risk of stranding," they wrote. "Only whales that likely stranded alive with no signs of injury, illness, emaciation, or human interaction (e.g. Navy sonar, entanglement, or boat strikes) were used."
They correlated the strandings with several long-running indices of solar activity including sunspot number, radio noise (F10.7) and geomagnetic activity (Ap). The results are shown in the histograms below.
Above: Strandings were correlated with sunspot number, strongly correlated with RF noise, and not correlated with geomagnetic activity. Full caption.
According to the statistics, there was a 4.3-fold increase in the likelihood of a stranding on days with high levels of 2800 MHz (F10.7) radio emission. On the other hand, there was NO relationship between the strandings and geomagnetic activity (Ap).
This is an important result, in part because it suggests how whales might be sensing magnetic fields. One possible explanation for magnetoreception in animals is the radical pair mechanism. This is a type of chemical compass in which magnetic fields regulate a chemical reaction involving proteins. In birds, the reaction takes place in the eyeball.
This type of compass can be disrupted by … you guessed it … radio frequency fields. If whales have a radical pair compass, it could explain Granger et al.’s results.
The new research could be life-saving as well. "Stranded whales rarely survive–only if they are found in time by groups that have the resources to re-float them," notes Granger. "Using this correlation we may be able to make better predictions about when whales are at a higher risk of live stranding, and have the stranding networks be more active during those time periods."
Given the recent troubles of grey whales, they need all the help they can get.
A sharable permalink to this article may be found here.
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
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A GIFT FROM THE EDGE OF SPACE: The most beautiful clouds on Earth are located in the stratosphere: Polar Stratospheric Clouds. Their extraordinary colors inspired this authentic Swarovski pendant--and it has been to the stratosphere! On Nov. 2, 2019, it hitched a ride 109,580 feet high on board an Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray balloon:
You can have it for $179.95. The students are selling Stratospheric Cloud Pendants to support their cosmic ray ballooning program. Each heart-shaped pendant comes with a card showing it floating through the stratosphere like a real cloud, and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space and back again.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
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Every night, a network of
NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.
On Feb. 28, 2020, the network reported 9 fireballs.
(9 sporadics)
In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (
PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding
new ones all the time.
On February 28, 2020 there were 2018 potentially hazardous asteroids.
|
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
2011 DR | 2020-Feb-23 | 14.7 LD | 5.8 | 25 |
2016 CO246 | 2020-Feb-23 | 18.4 LD | 5.9 | 25 |
2020 CY2 | 2020-Feb-23 | 11.2 LD | 3.8 | 11 |
2020 BR10 | 2020-Feb-23 | 15.4 LD | 15.1 | 100 |
2020 DN3 | 2020-Feb-23 | 1.3 LD | 14 | 16 |
2020 DO3 | 2020-Feb-23 | 3 LD | 15.7 | 12 |
2020 DW1 | 2020-Feb-23 | 6.8 LD | 7 | 12 |
2020 BW13 | 2020-Feb-24 | 9.1 LD | 2.4 | 12 |
2020 DV3 | 2020-Feb-25 | 1.1 LD | 12.1 | 10 |
2020 DT2 | 2020-Feb-25 | 5.2 LD | 11.9 | 11 |
2020 DQ3 | 2020-Feb-26 | 14.3 LD | 9.4 | 35 |
2012 DS30 | 2020-Feb-26 | 12.3 LD | 5.4 | 22 |
2020 DZ1 | 2020-Feb-27 | 7.4 LD | 14.1 | 56 |
2020 DE3 | 2020-Feb-28 | 9.8 LD | 9.1 | 60 |
2020 DM2 | 2020-Feb-28 | 5.9 LD | 4.9 | 12 |
2015 BK509 | 2020-Feb-29 | 18.7 LD | 12.5 | 118 |
2020 DV1 | 2020-Feb-29 | 10.5 LD | 15.6 | 51 |
2020 DM3 | 2020-Feb-29 | 3.2 LD | 15.8 | 21 |
2020 DP3 | 2020-Feb-29 | 14.8 LD | 7.9 | 24 |
2020 DR3 | 2020-Mar-01 | 11.7 LD | 10.8 | 21 |
2017 BM123 | 2020-Mar-01 | 10.5 LD | 8.1 | 65 |
2020 DW3 | 2020-Mar-01 | 5.1 LD | 5.1 | 8 |
2018 RF6 | 2020-Mar-10 | 11.2 LD | 12.6 | 36 |
2020 CA3 | 2020-Mar-10 | 13.8 LD | 6.3 | 30 |
2008 UB95 | 2020-Mar-11 | 18.5 LD | 7.6 | 41 |
2018 GY | 2020-Mar-15 | 6.2 LD | 9.5 | 39 |
2012 XA133 | 2020-Mar-27 | 17.4 LD | 23.7 | 235 |
2010 GD35 | 2020-Mar-29 | 15.3 LD | 12 | 43 |
2006 FH36 | 2020-Mar-30 | 11.3 LD | 5.1 | 93 |
2019 GM1 | 2020-Apr-02 | 9 LD | 4.2 | 14 |
2015 FC35 | 2020-Apr-04 | 10.5 LD | 13.8 | 148 |
2020 DT3 | 2020-Apr-05 | 17.6 LD | 11.8 | 175 |
2019 HM | 2020-Apr-10 | 7.2 LD | 3.2 | 23 |
363599 | 2020-Apr-11 | 19.2 LD | 24.5 | 224 |
2019 HS2 | 2020-Apr-26 | 13.6 LD | 12.6 | 17 |
2019 GF1 | 2020-Apr-27 | 18.7 LD | 3.2 | 12 |
Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach. | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere |
SOMETHING NEW! We have developed a new predictive model of aviation radiation. It's called E-RAD--short for Empirical RADiation model. We are constantly flying radiation sensors onboard airplanes over the US and and around the world, so far collecting more than 22,000 gps-tagged radiation measurements. Using this unique dataset, we can predict the dosage on any flight over the USA with an error no worse than 15%.
E-RAD lets us do something new: Every day we monitor approximately 1400 flights criss-crossing the 10 busiest routes in the continental USA. Typically, this includes more than 80,000 passengers per day. E-RAD calculates the radiation exposure for every single flight.
The Hot Flights Table is a daily summary of these calculations. It shows the 5 charter flights with the highest dose rates; the 5 commercial flights with the highest dose rates; 5 commercial flights with near-average dose rates; and the 5 commercial flights with the lowest dose rates. Passengers typically experience dose rates that are 20 to 70 times higher than natural radiation at sea level.
To measure radiation on airplanes, we use the same sensors we fly to the stratosphere onboard Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray balloons: neutron bubble chambers and X-ray/gamma-ray Geiger tubes sensitive to energies between 10 keV and 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.
Column definitions: (1) The flight number; (2) The maximum dose rate during the flight, expressed in units of natural radiation at sea level; (3) The maximum altitude of the plane in feet above sea level; (4) Departure city; (5) Arrival city; (6) Duration of the flight.
SPACE WEATHER BALLOON DATA: Approximately once a week, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. These balloons are equipped with radiation sensors that detect cosmic rays, a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. Cosmic rays can seed clouds, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. Furthermore, there are studies ( #1, #2, #3, #4) linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death in the general population. Our latest measurements show that cosmic rays are intensifying, with an increase of more than 18% since 2015:
The data points in the graph above correspond to the peak of the Regener-Pfotzer maximum, which lies about 67,000 feet above central California. When cosmic rays crash into Earth's atmosphere, they produce a spray of secondary particles that is most intense at the entrance to the stratosphere. Physicists Eric Reneger and Georg Pfotzer discovered the maximum using balloons in the 1930s and it is what we are measuring today.
En route to the stratosphere, our sensors also pass through aviation altitudes:
In this plot, dose rates are expessed as multiples of sea level. For instance, we see that boarding a plane that flies at 25,000 feet exposes passengers to dose rates ~10x higher than sea level. At 40,000 feet, the multiplier is closer to 50x.
The radiation sensors onboard our helium balloons detect X-rays and gamma-rays in the energy range 10 keV to 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.
Why are cosmic rays intensifying? The main reason is the sun. Solar storm clouds such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays when they pass by Earth. During Solar Maximum, CMEs are abundant and cosmic rays are held at bay. Now, however, the solar cycle is swinging toward Solar Minimum, allowing cosmic rays to return. Another reason could be the weakening of Earth's magnetic field, which helps protect us from deep-space radiation.
| The official U.S. government space weather bureau |
| The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena. |
| Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever. |
| 3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory |
| Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO. |
| from the NOAA Space Environment Center |
| fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong. |
| from the NOAA Space Environment Center |
| the underlying science of space weather |
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