"Solar Tsunami" Plasma Wave hits earth sometime today...
Depending on who you listen to it could cause either a wave of communications blackouts and other unforeseen electromagnetic interference or just some pretty lights in the sky...
Either way, it's probably a bad time to be going on a space-walk to fix the failed cooling system on a rickety space station.
"A blast of violent space weather could hit the Earth tomorrow following two massive explosions on the Sun. NASA astronomers witnessed a huge flare above a giant sunspot the size of our planet and linked to an even larger eruption across the surface of Sun.
By chance, the explosions were aligned towards Earth, sending a solar tsunami racing millions of miles across space.
Experts estimate a wave of supercharged gas called plasma will reach us this Tuesday when it will buffet the natural magnetic shield protecting Earth.
It could trigger spectacular displays of the aurora or northern and southern lights."
...but then again:
"This eruption is directed right at us," said Leon Golub, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
"It's the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time."
Scientists have warned that a really big solar eruption could destroy satellites and wreck power and communications grids around the globe if it happened today.
Nasa recently warned that Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”.
The Daily Telegraph disclosed in June that senior space agency scientists believed the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013.
It remains unclear, however, how much damage this latest eruption will cause the world’s communication tools."
The rational part of me knows that the nature of these sort of cosmic events is almost wholly unexplained, even the structure of the sun itself a mystery, every theory being displaced by something more complex and bizarre before the old math is even finished being worked out, and no expert can really estimate or predict fuck-all any more than a psychic octopus or a coin toss.
But I am a gambler, and for the other part of me those odds are good enough, and has readied the bug-out bags.
Seeing the Lights...
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