Space News

Sun Predicted To Be More Active Than Last 400 Years

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Right on the heels of my posting yesterday how Mother Nature loves mirrors, another example of this pops into the news! In this case, the solar sun spot cycle mirrors the earth's geomagnetic indices! With a mysterious five to ten year lag! No one has any idea how this works or why it works this way!

&hearts The last five solar cycles really battered us and the next one is proposed to be a doozy.

Dec. 21, 2006: Evidence is mounting: the next solar cycle is going to be a big one.

Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 "looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. He and colleague Robert Wilson presented this conclusion last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Ulimately, the earth heats up because the sun heats us up. The mix of gases in our atmosphere then determines how much is captured and kept within our ecosphere. Ski resort owners should just give up if they are in the lower elevations. There will be no reliable winters for the next ten years at least.

The sun definitely cycles. Like all things in nature, it isn't inert but rather has periods of gathering strength and then releasing of energy. Astronomers and geologists now believe the Earth was once locked in ice billions of years ago. This was surmised to be caused by the sun not 'shining' as much light as today. The star wasn't as active, in other words. Then, mysteriously, it 'fired up' and began to warm up the planet about 1.3 billion years ago and life began on earth in ernest.

Another mystery! I love these mysteries! In general, cycles tend to be part of something bigger than themselves, seeing how they connect is part of the joy of being an investigator. I am not an astronomer or even a scientist, I was born and raised in observatories...literally. I grew up with this community. I am not so hot with the numbers thing but I 'see' things all the time, it is a gift Pegasus gave me along with a few million volts of pure energy on several occasions.

Our sun is an old star. It has existed for one quarter of the length of Time itself, since the Big Bang. The fact that we are still way outside of the core of the Milky Way has convinced me many years ago that the sun is part of another, much smaller galaxy that fell into the Milky Way since it is an IRON LAW of Nature that ALL galaxies fall into ALL other galaxies. (Clearing my throat here) Whatever mathematical formula one arrives as to explain this reality, I would be in awe of the scientist able to do this. I always thought it was very amusing for Mother Nature to create the potential for all things to be expressed as numbers but that takes us back into religion and why the universe can be mirrored as numbers...

What causes stars to be born and to shine? Astronomers say, they form out of basically loose stuff that gets 'compressed'. &hearts We see stars forming not too far off from us here in this arm of the Milky Way, such as in the Orion constellation area where we see great clouds and sheets of 'non-shining' stuff, this is where the famous Horsehead nebula resides.

The nebulosity of the Horsehead is believed to be excited by the bright star Sigma Orionis, which is located above the top of the image. Just off the left side of the image is the bright star Zeta Orionis, which is the easternmost of the three stars that form Orion's belt. Zeta Orionis is a foreground star, and is not related to the nebula. The streaks in the nebulosity that extend above the Horsehead are likely due to magnetic fields within the nebula. Close study reveals that many more stars are visible in the top half of the image. Stars in the lower half of the image are obscured by a dark cloud of hydrogen gas

&hearts Orion is part of 'our' neighborhood, it is also part of something we are smack dab in the middle of, ourselves:

A description of our local region within the Milky Way would not be complete without a mention of Gould's Belt. In 1879 the astronomer Benjamin Gould reported his survey of the distribution of bright stars in the local Milky Way. Gould's work showed that a true local subsystem of young stars and gas existed in a rotating flat disk inclined some 20 degrees to the proper disk of the Milky Way. The disk extends some 2000 light years across and contains some of the most famous astronomical objects including the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula and Horsehead regions, the California Nebula, the Coal Sack and the Rho Ophiuchus clouds near Antares. Gould's Belt must be a young structure between 30 and 40 million years old by virtue of the young stars it contains but its origins are still unclear. One theory is that an errant supercloud collided with a major spiral arm of the Milky Way about 100 million years ago. The shock wave resulted in the process of braking and compression of the gas of the supercloud into a flat rotating disk. The older stars drifted out of the disk leaving the younger stars to form Gould's Belt.

Um, 4 billion years ago, our sun was born in this 'errant supercloud'. Stars born in smaller galaxies form groups. How shall I put it? Galaxies minding their own business, breezing along their ARC in the cosmos, sail along with old stars, all pretty much stable yellow guys along with assorted amounts of gases and thingies we call 'dust' and 'comets' and whatevers. Junk. And this largish mass with a non-blackhole center, namely, not very intensely organized but still enough gravity to form stars of middling size like our own sun, when two galaxies finally get within each other's tidal surges, they light up like a Christmas tree!

&hearts Gould's Belt is around 20 degrees of the galactic plane of the Milky Way.

In a now-classic 1974 paper, Richard Stothers and Jay Frogel ["The Local Complex of O and B Stars. I. Distribution of Stars and Interstellar Dust," R. Stothers and J. A. Frogel (1974), Astron. J., 79, 456.* -- WebEd.] mapped out the spatial extent of the belt. Using newly determined distances for B5 and hotter stars, they found two highly flattened stellar systems inclined by 19° – 22° to each other -- the underlying galactic field and Gould’s belt. Figure 1 below shows an edge-on view from within the galactic mid-plane. The dots represent stars of spectral type B5 and earlier (hotter). The Sun is at the intersection of the X and Z axes, and the galactic centre is well out of the view to the right, 8,500 parsecs (pc) distant. The intersection of these planes coincides almost exactly with the position of the Sun. Actually, the Sun is about 20 pc above the galactic plane, but is, within the errors, precisely in the plane of Gould’s belt. The stellar density decreases with distance from the Sun because stars at greater distances are less completely sampled.

Brilliant, hot, white suns of super-duper size form out of all that 'stuff' that is the envelope of the older, yellow stars. A classic way to detect a smaller galaxy merging with a bigger one is, the new star formation areas are at an angle to each other just like our own mini-galaxy which I will call the Orion Galaxy since the starmaking in that section is most intense right now.

When our happy little sun fell towards the Milky Way, the neighborhood became hotter, literally. And the sun became more active, too. Now we are in the grip of greater tidal forces, doubled. And between them, our sun shines quite actively. The earth heated up and the ice melted and life teemed across the surface. The outside forces working on our sun aren't even, there is obviously some pulsation involved over long cycles. We can't see them all..yet. But with the new probes, we see more and more.

Even with our current state of knowledge, dating eons-old events in the Galaxy is fraught with difficulty. To be certain by better than a factor of two is to do well. That said, the history of Gould’s belt as currently envisioned is as follows. Perhaps more so than today, the belt in the past comprised a sheet of discrete clouds of gas mingled with stars. Some 30 million years ago an event triggered a burst of star formation at the position of the Per OB3 association [also refered as 'Alpha Per group' -- WebEd.]. This could have been the passage of the last spiral density wave through the area, the collision of a high-velocity cloud falling back through the galactic plane, or the latest oscillation of the belt through the galactic midplane. Any such mechanism would have sufficiently compressed the affected molecular clouds comprising the belt to initiate star birth.

Note the quesiness of this passage. Thinking of our sun as part of a smaller galaxy that is now being ripped apart by the Milky Way is scary. So there is a lot of evasion in the thinking of astronomers. They might break out of this and reconsider things. I think it is neat, we came here from somewhere else! This makes our journey through the cosmos most interesting. We have to consider this: we are probably a small piece of the Big Bang that shot outwards in a long trajectory, we sailed through the cosmos for around 8 billion years before we began to close in on the Milky Way that reeled us in like a fisherman brings in the trout.

&hearts Click here to read the full PDF document concerning theh Gould Belt and how pulses from it sends meteorites and such flying into our own solar system, creating extinction events.

Note that the asteroids, meteorites and comets menacing us aren't coming from the Milky Way but are from our own galaxy that is still being pulled relentlessly into the Milky Way's orb! This means 'local' events are from our own cosmos and not part of the larger cosmos of the much bigger galaxy that has captured us. How all this affects the sun is still to be seen. All I know is, our sun isn't all that stable anymore and our planet, one of the livelier ones in this sector of creation, mirrors some of this...

Culture of Life News Main Page

Dark Matter And The Curved Universe

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Dark matter doesn't matter unless it is a stand-in for something else. Namely, since we can't see the biggest forces pulling millions and millions of galaxies into nothingness, maybe we are seeing what happens if everything is flowing back towards the Big Bang? An interesting mindgame worth playing. (Thanks for bringing this up, JSmith!)

&hearts So, not only are smaller star systems falling into the gravity pools of larger galaxies and galaxies are colliding and merging with each other all over kingdom come but galactic CLUSTERS are slamming into each other, too?

Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The discovery, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, gives direct evidence for the existence of dark matter.

This composite image shows the galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, also known as the "bullet cluster." This cluster was formed after the collision of two large clusters of galaxies, the most energetic event known in the universe since the Big Bang. (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.; Lensing Map: NASA/STScI; ESO WFI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.)

"This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
These observations provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it is stronger on intergalactic scales than predicted by Newton and Einstein, removing the need for dark matter. However, such theories cannot explain the observed effects of this collision.

OK, a mere 'collision' of two streams of galaxies is nearly as big as the Big Bang? I looked at the data and it is a big lighting up of a lot of something! But the question really is, what the hell drew not just one stream of millions of galaxies but two streams, into one spot? And they heated up everything but didn't dissolve? And where the hell are they going, anyway? Eh?

None of this makes sense even with dark matter thrown in. Is everything on the same plane and streaming towards the same point? Huh? Yes? and what is this 'point'? Is is singular? A singularity that is a mirror of the original Big Bang? Why does Nature love circles, rebirths, why does She adore pulling things together and then blowing them up again?

My own feeble mind suspects She has Her usual iron rules concerning all this. She hates eternity and forever. When She was trapped in Eternity, She BLEW UP. Thinking about all this as mythology or putting a human face on all this makes it much easier to think about the meanings of all the data that is flowing here.

&hearts The problem isn't the existence of 'dark matter' but explaining why everything is flowing in 'rivers' and 'clusters' and 'clumping' and other odd things which shouldn't be possible in an expanding universe.

Dark Matter Exists
Sean at 11:52 am, August 21st, 2006

The great accomplishment of late-twentieth-century cosmology was putting together a complete inventory of the universe. We can tell a story that fits all the known data, in which ordinary matter (every particle ever detected in any experiment) constitutes only about 5% of the energy of the universe, with 25% being dark matter and 70% being dark energy. The challenge for early-twenty-first-century cosmology will actually be to understand the nature of these mysterious dark components. A beautiful new result illuminating (if you will) the dark matter in galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 is an important step in this direction. (Here’s the press release, and an article in the Chandra Chronicles.)

A prerequisite to understanding the dark sector is to make sure we are on the right track. Can we be sure that we haven’t been fooled into believing in dark matter and dark energy?

It is certainly a mirror image that we can't see the Big Bang but it is shrouded and veiled in Darkness. There are many theories about this. But then, the Great Attractor and this other end of the Universe where the Bullet galaxies collided, the force at work is equally occulted. We can't see it, we can only sense it.

&hearts Here are some postings from NASA concerning our half of the Universe, concerning the Great Attractor.

Galaxies dot the sky like jewels in the direction of a mass so large it is known simply as the Great Attractor. The galaxies pictured above are part of a cluster of galaxies called ACO 3627 near the center of the Great Attractor. Previously, this cluster of galaxies, also known as the Norma Cluster, was largely unstudied because dust in the disk of our own Galaxy obscured much of its light. The Great Attractor is a diffuse mass concentration fully 250 million light-years away, but so large it pulls our own Milky Way Galaxy and millions of others galaxies towards it. Many of the galaxies in ACO 3627 are slowly heading towards collisions with each other.

We aren't just moving towards this thing, we are flowing 'in a river' towards it just like we see all over the Universe, when we look around us, we see streams of galaxies flowing in rivers! Because of this, we must assume they see us the exact same way. The odds of there being some entities in any of these other galaxies watching us is actually rather high since the number of stars in these millions of galaxies are in the billions per galaxy if we consider the larger ones! Wave hello to them! Hi.

I bet if we made contact with them, they would immediately run a trade surplus with us and we would have to ask them for loans. In zrrrixles.

&hearts Here is the Great River of Galaxies yet again.

This mass migration includes the Local Group, the Virgo Cluster, the Hydra--Centaurus Supercluster, and other groups and clusters for a distance of at least 60 Mpc up and downstream from us. It is as if a great river of galaxies (including our own) is flowing with a swift current of 600 km/s toward Centaurus.

Location of the Great Attractor

Calculations indicate that ~1016 solar masses concentrated 65 Mpc away in the direction of Centaurus would account for this. This mass concentration has been dubbed the Great Attractor. Detailed investigation of that region of the sky (see adjacent image of the galaxy cluster Abell 3627) finds 10 times too little visible matter to account for this flow, again implying a dominant gravitational role for unseen or dark matter. Thus, the Great Attractor is certainly there (because we see its gravitational influence), but the major portion of the mass that must be there cannot be seen in our telescopes.

It really irks me that we can't see any of this. And this makes me very suspicious. Why would It be Dark? Who turned off the lights? Seeing all this with childish eyes makes one ask interesting questions. Nature, we know for a fact, loves mirror images. She loves to have dualities, She is addicted to opposites. The very fundamentals of Her schemes involve polarizations.

So why not here? Eh? Heh.

Are those distant galaxies seeming to be moving in giant rivers away from us and towards 'It' really disappearing into nothingness? Or are we just unable to see them because they are circling around the other side of Creation and we will suddenly 'see' them when we slam into them????

&hearts Here is a PDF of a paper discussing the 'rarity' of the Bullet galaxies colliding.

I remember when the first pictures of two galaxies colliding were obvious when seen by the new Hubble telescope. I said back then, 'If this is true, this means ALL galaxies are colliding!' And I was right. We are all on collision courses with each other and something we can sense but not see! Since this is universal this means it is one of Nature's beloved 'iron clad laws.' And being that, it means it has a shape to it, it is not 'flying apart at the seams forever' because She hates this idea. Comes from being a mother and all that.

&hearts Here is a movie comparing two galactic clusters that have tremendous disturbances in their forces and thus are lighting up the cosmos around themselves.

This sequence compares the physical size of the cavities found in MS 0735.6+7421 and the Perseus cluster, another well-known galaxy cluster with cavities. These two clusters are at very different distances -- Perseus is about 250 million light years away and MS 0735 is almost three billion light years away. To make a direct size comparison, the Perseus cluster is shrunk to simulate its appearance at the farther distance of MS 0735. From this comparison, it is obvious that the cavities in MS 0735 are much larger than those found in Perseus.

Do note the shape of both of these huge cluster's centers. Each one has a mirror polar opposite. There is this VOID in the center of each of these things. What if this is the model of the Big Bang? And we are riding on the outer surface of one of the twin bubbles? If we go through Nature's creations here on our tiny planet, we see the same impulse: things mimic each other, they mirror themselves outrageously which is why we have two arms, two legs, two eyes, etc. We have one heart and this displacement interfaces with other forces within and without our bodies. Trees like to be symetrical, sea shells are symetrical, the planet is symetrical with a north pole and a south pole. The Moon is round, too and so is our sun! And so on.

So I propose, the Universe is also symetrical. And like all systems we see, it is compact and tends to curve. Mother Nature isn't masculine, She likes round things. Curvaceous. Repeticious. Suspicious, too, for that matter.

And if there is 'dark matter' you can bet there is 'white matter' which we can't see...yet.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Were The Earliest Stars Already Black Holes?

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Astronomers continue to try to fit new data into the presuppositions already held concerning how the universe formed 13+billion years ago right after the Big Bang. The most recent data shows the earliest ‘stars’ were too ‘big’ to be stars as we know them from studying events that are closer in time.

&hearts The earliest stars as black holes makes a lot of sense to me.

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 18 December 2006

Astronomers might have seen the very first stars in the universe. If so, these are incredible stars, some 1,000 times as massive as the Sun.

The alternative is just as interesting: The objects might be early black holes consuming gas voraciously and spitting out radiation like crazy as nascent galaxies form.

‘Consuming gas and spitting out radiation’...this means the gravity pools of these ‘first whatevers’ attracted anything in their vicinity and as these gases were compacted, the atoms were split and this created ‘radiation.’ The interesting question here is, how many of these ‘things’ were there and does this number correspond with the number of galaxies we see, say, a billion years old instead of 13 billion years old.

If galaxies are merging with each other----and we see this happening all around us right now---then there would be far fewer galaxies compared to the number of these earliest black holes. If we are still rapildly expaning, no galaxies would have even the slightest possibility of merging with any others so the question is, are we at the midpoint where galaxies can’t fly further apart, or we could be flying faster apart because some mysteriious force is attracting us or we could be falling towards the Great Attractor.

There is no easy answer to all this but there is rational thoughts that are possible. The idea that something is forcing everything apart is very out dated and sticks around only because of the natural tendency of people to cling to previous ideas and there has to be some explanation about the way light is warped by time and space and making up some mysterious force saves one from having to think we are really falling kind of backwards, so to speak.

A little math therefore shows that these newfound objects are indeed the infants of the universe. But what are they? If they are stars, they are about 10 times more massive than theories suggest the first stars would have been.

The mysterious objects are in clusters. If they are each stars, then the clusters might be the first mini-galaxies. And if so, each apparently has a mass that's less than a million suns. Our Milky Way, by contrast, holds the mass of about 100 billion suns and is thought to have been built up by mergers of smaller galaxies—perhaps like those the astronomers now think they might be seeing.

Everywhere we look in the past, all celestial objects are in clusters. I would suspect a law of nature would be, ‘After the Big Bang, all things will form clusters’. People have devised all sorts of mathematical models for nature and the reliance on these formulae is the foundation of science. But before one comes up with these scripts, they first have to have an ideological mental framework that sets the stage for understanding the math which is basically an attempt to quantify nature’s functions.

She has this tendency to set iron rules that simply can’t be violated. Learning these rules and using them for our own ends has been the quest of all humans since we first picked up a stick or stone and threw them. The first human to take a bone and scratch onto it the number of days for the moon to wax and then wane was someone quantifying nature. Early humans were puzzled by women bleeding every month when they were not with child or nursing a child. Tallying the moon’s phases and then setting this within the idea of menstral periods was an intellectual feat. Indeed, the ancient term for female bleeding comes from the word for ‘moon.’

All of nature is full of such influences and subtilties. For thousands of years, early astronomers and others universally called the beginnings of our existence in the deepest pasts, a time of Chaos. Astronomers see the past based on this ancient grid that is deep within our culture. Now that we get some data coming from that very time period, the challenge of understanding it is made harder by the fact this grid exists.

From the article:

"There's ongoing debate about what the first objects were and how galaxies formed," said Harvey Moseley of Goddard, a co-author on the new papers.

Some think our galaxy and other large galaxies grew through mergers. One recent study questioned that notion, however.

How much force did the Big Bang have? The assumption right now is, the force was so great, it blew apart everything and we are still in the grip of this trajectory only few astronomers want to view this as a ‘trajectory’ for this means what goes ‘up’...must come ‘down’. When one looks at all the laws of nature, something becomes very clear: there is no infinity. Even stasis isn’t eternal. The worship of ‘eternity’ and why all religions call upon this force is due to humans wanting stasis. The dynamism of nature is frightening because it all has this built-in trajectory leading to mergers and death.

Galaxies merge. Stars die. Black holes suck down everything they can. Things become destabilized and blow up. Matter degrades over time. When things merge, they change and cease to be what they were before. Everything ages. Entropy.

So how could our galaxy be, relative to all previous things we see from the past, be ‘speeding up’ if it is ‘flying away’? Absent some accelerating action, we should be slowing down unless we are...falling. Namely, we must be on the ‘falling back to earth’ phase. This is, like all things in nature, a trajectory. We can’t be flying towards some ‘attractor’ unless it is some monster black hole object that is attracting a lot more than our lonely, little galaxy.

Why would there be just one thing ‘pulling’ on us, making us move faster and faster while not doing that to all other things? And if ALL galaxies are moving towards some mysterious thingie that is making them accelerate, this would mean this giant thingie is all over creation and is bigger than the entire universe in size! And then it ceases to be anything at all but makes our universe into this big balloon whereby the balloon is a force, itself?

I cannot accept this visualization. If astronomers cannot put into simple mind-pictures, what is going on, this means they messed up. Picturing black holes which are super-dense and grow in size as the assimulate more and more mass, is logical and easy. When first proposed, many astronomers rejected this only due to inertia within their own brains.

But this new idea that we are flying apart faster and faster flies in the face of Nature herself. Either we are falling into something denser than we are or we are propelling ourselves forwards due to the energy of the Big Bang.

If that were so, no small galaxies would be falling towards us. They should have shot past us long ago and been out of here, flying madly in a straight line towards infinity, faster and faster if there is this ‘mysterious force’ attracting them!

But they aren’t attracted to some distant, mysterious force, they are attracted to our bigger galaxy! And we have proof a number of these smaller galaxies have also been attracted to our galaxy and this would be utterly impossible if they were individually flying straight outwards!

Perhaps the first eons, say the first 2 billion years, smaller galaxies might have fallen into bigger ones but the ones like the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds certainly would not be anywhere near our galaxy 11 billion years later! And all the dirt our galaxy is vacuuming up even now, wouldn’t be here if space were expanding. Nature is logical, she loves laws and strictly adheres to them and she hates a vacuum. And infinity. And eternity.

We are coming into Christmas where the Christians celebrate the 'birth' of a human that died, sprang out of his grave and then flew to the Heavens to Life Forever. Humans want desperately to believe in infinite, death-defying gods! The ancient Egyptians build all sorts of amazing structures that stood for thousands of years in the hope of gaining infinite life after death. All religions try to defy destruction. This is why they ask their believers to not pay attention to Mother Nature and Her nasty, inflexible laws. We strive to jump the cow over the moon and make the dog laugh.

Mother Nature gets the last laugh. And this all takes me back to the thing that always bothers me: after 4.5 billion years, our itsy-bitsy sun, a very minor star, is still far outside the Galactic Center, we are at the very outer edges. And yet whole small galaxies are being sucked in! Um....isn't that interesting. I noticed in the news that the comet material brought back last summer isn't what they expected at all. It seems it is really 'old' stuff from back in the sun's 'beginning.' Evidently, we and it have been traveling together, in a group, since the material was knocked together to birth the sun. We know so little, the more we see, the less we really know.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Sunspot 930 Very Active Today

Elaine Meinel Supkis

This time, Sunspot 930 didn't spit out x-rays but had a bigger corneal event. This coincides with NASA desiring the astronauts making some space walks which would be fatal if an x-ray event were to happen. Since this happened twice already with this particular sunspot, sending astronauts out when this is pointed straight at us is lunacy.

Just this afternoon, it happened again, this deeply agitated sunspot that has already caused a 'tsunami' to surge across the surface of the sun and then shot out x-rays not once but twice, has unleashed another powerful event but this doesn't have the x-ray signature.

&hearts The drones at Bad Astronomy.com are chuckling about this latest out of character flaring of Sunspot 930.

It's a biggie!
Imaged by projecting the sun through a 21/2"refractor onto a sheet of white paper and taking a picture with my digital camera. Enhanced with Picture-It and cleaned with Noiseware.
Now it's Paul's and Guillaume Bertrand's turn!

Children, when they see the sea retreating and observe all the sea creatures stranded on the sand, rush forwards to pick them up. Taking childish glee in explosions, many young people think this is all very funny or amazing in a brainless way. It is not.

Very few astronomers tell the truth. My grandfather had no gumption about sugar-coating astronomical realities: he told me, if the sun were to explode or implode, I have 8 minutes warning and then...poof. This meant I couldn't accept the bland statements from astronomers that our sun is 'middle aged.'

We now know it is over 4 billion years old. This fact should sober us. Thinking it is 'young' is a mental trick designed to comfort us rather than alarm us. Assembling geological facts of various sorts had forces us to realize the star we circle isn't 'constant' at all.

&hearts As a reminder, we have had some really powerful x-ray events this last five years despite the sun being past the peak of the 11 year cycle.

On 4 November 2003, the largest solar flare ever recorded exploded from the Sun's surface, sending an intense burst of radiation streaming towards the Earth. Before the storm peaked, x-rays overloaded the detectors on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), forcing scientists to estimate the flare's size.

Taking a different route, researchers from the University of Otago used radio wave-based measurements of the x-rays' effects on the Earth's upper atmosphere to revise the flare's size from a merely huge X28 to a "whopping" X45, say researchers Neil Thomson, Craig Rodger, and Richard Dowden. X-class flares are major events that can trigger radio blackouts around the world and long-lasting radiation storms in the upper atmosphere that can damage or destroy satellites. The biggest previous solar flares on record were rated X20, on 2 April 2001 and 16 August 1989.

"This makes it more than twice as large as any previously recorded flare, and if the accompanying particle and magnetic storm had been aimed at the Earth, the damage to some satellites and electrical networks could have been considerable," says Thomson. Their calculations show that the flare's x-ray radiation bombarding the atmosphere was equivalent to that of 5,000 Suns, though none of it reached the Earth's surface, the researchers say.

We are supposed to be at the bottom of this peak. It is less than at the peak but it is still very active when contrasted to how it probably was back during the various Ice Ages. I would suggest, when North and South America joined and cut off the Atlantic/Pacific conveyor belt. What this did was amplified the variable star's input into the atmosphere and this meant any swings in generating energy by our local star would cause a cascade of atmospheric and weather-related events that would cause big pendulum swings in world temperatures.

Within just three days of this recent energetic event, it is warm here! My photo above is Berlin, upstate New York in the middle of December! And it feels like and looks like....April. Late April, at that! Morning fog and then a sunny day? Just two weeks ago, it was sort of like winter but as soon as the sun flared, it warmed up. All over the globe. This should be big news but because it conflicts with the global warming news, it is being ignored.

But understanding the sun doesn't mean becoming stupid about our contribution to Global Warming. Finessing the message is what science is all about and to do this, people must learn to absorb all sorts of data. The process means highlighting all these matters, not ignoring them.

&hearts Here is a story from last year about stars spitting out x-rays.

By David McAlary
VOA News
May 13, 2005

WASHINGTON - Astronomers say violent solar x-ray outbursts that would scorch Earth today paradoxically could have protected the planet billions of years ago while it was forming. A survey of very young stars by an orbiting NASA observatory finds that many like the Sun produce massive flares that help planets survive destruction during their emergence.

Without a time machine as a tool, astronomers observe other stars like the Sun at various stages of their existence to guess what might have occurred in our solar system's early years or what its future might be like.

&hearts Here is a solar weather website run by NASA:

Geophysical Activity Forecast: The geomagnetic field is expected to reach major to severe storm levels. Activity from the CME observed early on 13 December is expected to impact the geomagnetic field by mid to late UTC on day 1 (14 December) of the forecast period. Major to severe storm conditions are expected to continue early into 15 December. Levels should decrease to unsettled to minor storming by 16 December. The greater than 100 MeV and 10 MeV proton events now in progress are expected to continue for the next 24 to 48 hours.

This story neglects to mention the other side of this tale: stars that are going to go nova also spit out x-rays in ever-greater amounts. The reason we have to ignore this is because we don't want to face any possible facts. And since I grew up figuring out that if stars blow up, our sun can too, I can't sweep all this under some rug or treat it as an unmentionable.

I suspect readers of this will call me names or claim I am sowing hysteria. But I have lectured on the topic of interstellar/intergenerational flight and I always opened my lectures by talking about the limitations of our own sun and why we ought to seek out other star systems for the simple reason is, we must if we don't want to be snuffed.

&hearts This inability to accept reality is a problem with NASA.

Discovery's crew awoke Thursday to a recording of Queen's "Under Pressure," a fitting message from Houston for the two spacewalking astronauts who will be under a tight schedule to get their complicated rewiring tasks done.

Astronauts Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang, who performed Discovery's first spacewalk on Tuesday to install a two-ton, $11-million addition, were set to again step out of the space station Thursday, this time to reconfigure the power system controlling one-half of the space station. They'll do that by rewiring connectors from a temporary solar panel to the permanent ones.

Half the station will be powered down during this process, but critical systems, like computers, will be switched to the other side temporarily.

Even though astronomers saw this nasty sunspot developing, NASA had to shoot off the space shuttle and even as the evil eye of the storm circled towards the earth and aimed straight for us, they still thought about the possibility of space walks? They should have been honest in this article and explained how this can't be done safely so long as a sunspot this dire and this large is facing the earth. The fact that this was left out of the article annoys the hell out of me. We shouldn't be treated like babies!

And rewiring the space station during a major x-ray event? HUH???? Um, they pressed the astronauts to do this because they lost time due to the solar storms and the window of further x-ray events is not gone, not at all. But due to the lack of support and the lack of operational shuttles, they have to do it or else.

&hearts Here is a website honestly talking, sort of, about how our sun is a variable star.

You already know that the Sun makes life possible. Its heat and light drive dynamic processes in the Earth system, from climate and ocean currents to photosynthesis. But were you aware that the Sun is a variable star? Or that solar winds stream off its surface and blast through space at more than a million miles per hour? Here's more about the star that's the source of it all.

Twenty years ago, this was verboten. It is still verboten to call the sun 'an OLD star.' But trust me, it is quite ancient. What saved us was not some hypothetical age but OUR DiSTANCE FROM THE BLACK HOLES in the center of the Milky Way. The closer one is, the more likely one will blow up younger is, I think, a law of nature. We are way outside the tidal influences of this large spiral galaxy!

Culture of Life News Main Page

Big X-ray Flare From Sun Ignored By USA News

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The sun shot a major X-ray flare several days ago and the same dark spot has now moved to the side facing the Earth and it had a lesser but still major event, a good hunk of corona is now flying towards us as well as the x-rays. Despite this being a big event, the American news media remains pretty much mute except for a small item today about the astronauts forced to take shelter. At this point, some astronomy websites are wondering why this is so. I say, blame NASA. And their GOP handlers.

&hearts Here is the small story that is tucked away on the back pages of most major media.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Solar bursts prompt station crews

A violent solar explosion sent a dangerous wave of radiation through space late Tuesday, prompting NASA to order the crews of Discovery and the International Space Station to take shelter overnight.

The solar flare erupted around 9:40 p.m., unleashing enough radiation to disrupt radio communications on Earth and in orbit while endangering astronauts circling 220 miles above the planet.

There is a certain fatalism about the sun. Even after tons of evidence shows clearly that our ice ages start and stop with tremendous suddeness and this has a harmonic relationship with the earth’s tilt and the sun’s output, people still imagine we can just ignore all this and maybe it won’t matte.

What is really odd about this attitude is, for the entire existence of humans as a species, we have shown tremendous interest in this star! The sun is of supreme importance and interest. Worries about solar output or existing, even, lies in the heart of every religion even the modern debased religions that worship mere humans like Jesus or Moses or Mohammed or Buddha.

The elemental gods of storms and growing things all look to the solar gods. For everything here on earth is ultimately ruled by this ancient star. Humans dragged huge stones long distances in order to make observatories like Stonehenge in order to understand the sun and track it and to make the rituals designed to assauge and assist the solar gods in their ever-changing cycles.

We are sliding into the annual Winter Solstice. This is always a very dire time for fear the sun will keep moving off and might disappear altogether, lies at the roots of many religions. I find it peculiar that news about the sun’s disorders isn’t being reported because frankly, I think the news media is frightened of this news and hope it will mean nothing at all.

NASA is enabling this because the office that deals with the press keeps the astronomers locked in a closet and the right wing luantic running NASA doesn’t want any scary talk or any talk at all! Intimidated by this political censorship and control, astronomers have to put out bland statements and keep their profiles under a basket and not make a ruckus.

I assure everyone, there is a HUUUUGE debate going on behind the scenes over the nature of the sun and why it is so active at this particular time and what this means. I would suggest here that the increasing instability of the sun is due to it riding closer and closer to the Milky Way galaxy and as other celestial objects circling that nest of hug black holes at the center, are exerting influences on our own sun. Just as when smaller galaxies fall into greater ones, a zillion hot white giant stars blossom rapidly, so it is here: do note how much brighter the galaxy is as we approach!

We are still so far out (um, after 4+billion years, we should be at the center, you know, if we were here from the beginning!) we can only see a tiny bit of this activity with the naked eye, most of it masked by vast sheets of interstellar non-compressed matter.

&hearts Here is the news in New Zeland.

X-FLARE: Sunspot 930 has just unleashed another big solar flare, an X3-class explosion at 0240 UT on Dec. 13th. In Huirangi, New Zealand, photographer Andy Dodson caught the spot in mid-flare:

Photo details: Dec. 13, 2006, 0350 UT; Coronado SolarMax40, Stellarvue 80.

As a result of the blast, a radiation storm is underway. Based on the energy and number of solar protons streaming past Earth, NOAA ranks the storm as category S2: satellites may experience some glitches and reboots, but astronauts are in no danger.

The explosion hurled a coronal mass ejection toward Earth. (Confirmed by SOHO; stay tuned for the movie.) Sky watchers should be alert for auroras when it arrives on Dec. 14th.

People in Alaska live in the area of the North Polar vortex and thus are very exposed to all this stuff and they aren’t told about it? Oh, look at the pretty lights!---isn’t that irresponsible? During x-ray events like this, they stop flights over the North Pole so for that reason alone, one would think this would be a news item, no?

Probably is by the time I publish this. It isn’t my responsibility to track and post stories about celestial events but it certainly the hell is NASA’s responsiblity! So my story is about how NASA has allowed this to collapse. How they pretend there is no news when there is news. This news makes havok of the plans of the ‘Go to Mars’ lunatics. They poo-poo the problems of solar x-ray events or claim they don’t happen all that often so why worry, etc.

&hearts Here is another outsider blog like my own that wonders why there is no news about this major x-ray event.

Major Solar Eruption - Little Comment in Western Press

If you are into following events involving sol, our system's central star, you may have heard of a major event in progress right now, but chances are you haven't heard as the Western media is strangely silent about the event.

NASA has issued a communication about the event that plays down the importance of what is happening. Apart from an Item in Astronomy and Space News, the story was picked up - as far as I can tell - so far only by a paper in Brisbane, Australia.

&hearts As always, here is the first blog to talk about the lack of information coming out of NASA and the lacisdasical media attitude: Culture of Life News!

One would think the news of a very violent eruption on the sun would be front page news. I scan all the news wires all the time and on Dec. 6th, there was a 'tsunami' solar flare events that shook the surface of our local star but this didn't make any headline news outside of the astronomy community. The sun isn't totally stable and certainly not in the last 6 million years, is it stable, this coincides with the evolution of humans who needed big brains to cope with the changes wrought by the instability of the sun. What is going on here?

I’m first out of the gate and running ahead of the pack. As always. Don’t forget to wear your lead hat today.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Saturn Polar 'Storm' Proves ALL Planets Have Polar Vortex Storms

NASA: storm eye on Saturn
Elaine Meinel Supkis

NASA recently reported an amazing 'storm' on the south pole of Saturn. The astronomers working for the government express astonishment at this 'singularity' only outsiders on the web instantly compared it to the one observed on Venus' south pole several years ago. I say, all planets have these south polar vortexes! Far from unusual, it is NORMAL.

&hearts Sometimes the vortexes become quite visible.

"It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn't behave like a hurricane," said Dr. Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini's imaging team at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "Whatever it is, we're going to focus on the eye of this storm and find out why it's there."

A movie taken by Cassini's camera over a three-hour period reveals winds around Saturn's south pole blowing clockwise at 550 kilometers (350 miles) per hour. The camera also saw the shadow cast by a ring of towering clouds surrounding the pole, and two spiral arms of clouds extending from the central ring. These ring clouds, 30 to 75 kilometers (20 to 45 miles) above those in the center of the storm, are two to five times taller than the clouds of thunderstorms and hurricanes on Earth.

The vortex phenomena periodically becomes very pronounced. This means something is happening that affects the intensity of these polar vortexes and the job of the astronomer is to understand why this varies and how it expresses itself.

&hearts There is one group that believes all this is electrical.

A gigantic vortex centered on Saturn's south pole has sent astronomers scrambling for answers -- again. They remain unaware that Wallace Thornhill had predicted this very "surprise."

A recent image of Saturn's south polar region, taken by the Cassini spacecraft, poses further mysteries for NASA investigators. The cameras reveal a giant hurricane-like "storm" with a polar eye, ringed by towering clouds.

*snip*

Since eye-wall clouds are a distinguishing feature of hurricanes on Earth, NASA astronomers have been quick to draw a parallel, though in their own words, the differences are noteworthy as well. As the NASA news release states, "This giant Saturnian storm is apparently different from hurricanes on Earth because it is locked to the pole and does not drift around. Also, since Saturn is a gaseous planet, the storm forms without an ocean at its base."

I do read this particular site because it can be most interesting, one must review all options when trying to riddle out something. A number of websites this week have pointed out to NASA the fact that NASA itself has the identical article about Venus!

&hearts Venus doesn't just have a vortex, it is bipolar.

There is evidence of a Hadley Cell on Venus, which means that hot air rises at the equator and is transported polewards in the upper atmosphere. This gives rise to a 'polar dipole', a vast vortex with an unusual double-eye feature that rotates around the pole and features reduced cloud cover associated with rapidly descending air. This polar vortex is bounded by a a 'polar collar', a wide (~1000km), shallow (~10km) river of cold air which circulates around the pole at about 70º. The North polar region has been observed by Pioneer Venus and Venera 15 spacecraft, but the South polar aregion has scarcely been observed. An outstanding question is whether the South polar region exhibits phenomena similar to those at the North pole.

The 'storm' on Venus whereby the bipolar situation became one big 'eye' is most interesting. Venus and Saturn have very thick atmospheric gases so when vortexes form, they are very visible. We don't 'see' them frequently only because they are polar and thus, we must have a satellite circling their poles in order to really get a good look. Passive watching misses these 'storms'.

&hearts And surprize! Earth has both north and south polar vortexes, too, and it is bipolar!

The polar vortex is a persistent, large-scale cyclone located near the Earth's poles, in the middle and upper troposphere and the stratosphere. It surrouds the polar highs and is part of the polar front The vortex is most powerful in the hemisphere's winter, when the temperature gradient is steepest, and diminishes or can disappear in the summer. The Antarctic polar vortex is more pronounced and persistent than the Arctic one; this is because the distribution of land masses at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere gives rise to Rossby waves which contribute to the breakdown of the vortex, whereas in the southern hemisphere the vortex remains more undisturbed. The Arctic vortex is elongated in shape, with two centres, one roughly over Baffin Island in Canada and the other over northeast Siberia.

The chemistry of the Antarctic polar vortex has created severe ozone depletion. The nitric acid in polar stratospheric clouds reacts with CFCs to form chlorine, which catalyzes the photochemical destruction of ozone. Chlorine concentrations build up during the winter polar night, and the consequent ozone destruction is greatest when the sunlight returns in spring (September/October). These clouds can only form at temperatures below about -80°C, so the warmer Arctic region does not have an ozone hole.

Contrary to NASA's belief, these 'storms' are caused by heat, it seems they are most 'active' in winter! And being polar, the winters are really cold! One must submit here, polar vortices are quite different from vortexes (hurricanes and typhoons) that form on the equators. What fuels the polar vortex formations is very different from what causes them on the equators. Namely, the sun's affect on the atmosphere on the equators is much greater than on the polar regions.

&hearts Jupiter has a polar vortex, too.

The presence of an arctic polar vortex in Jupiter was confirmed by Orton et al. (2002, Bull. Amer. Astron. Soc. 34, 855--856) who detected a strong temperature gradient near 65 degrees N latitude with the polar temperature several degrees colder than those at lower latitudes. Their measurements were made in mid-1999 when Jupiter's pole was at an optimum position for observing. The continued presence of the vortex was confirmed by NASA IRTF mid-infrared images taken on 30--31 December 2000, which were coincident with spectra taken by the Cassini Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) which provided a means to determine details of the temperature profile variation, as well as assess the entrainment of gases by the vortex. The thermal and haze boundary was semi-hexagonal in polar projection, qualitatively similar to its 1999 appearance, with the maximum temperature gradient in the stratosphere and the troposphere nearly coincident. Tropospheric (~200-mbar) and mid-stratospheric (~30 mbar)temperature differences across the vortex boundary are both on the order of 5--7 K. On the other hand, in the upper stratosphere (~1 mbar), the relationship is inverted, and the polar vortex is actually warmer by 10 K. The relatively low opacity of clouds at 5 microns suggests a prevailing downwelling of dry air in the vortex region, although a preliminary assessment of the para-H_2 mixing ratio yields a low value that is more consistent with upwelling. The abundance of NH_3 gas near 300 mbar (above the condensation region) appears to vary little between the vortex and its exterior. Because temperatures are warmer inside the vortex above the ~2-mbar level, determining the distribution of stratospheric hydrocarbons across the boundary depends critically on their altitude distribution. This work was supported by NASA.

So, instead of showing shock and surprize every time NASA discovers polar vortex storms, they should state clearly that ALL PLANETS HAVE THESE! Period. So the question is, what causes them?

The bipolar situation on earth is mirrored by Venus. Venus turns much slower than the earth, a day lasts much, much longer than our days yet the planet has a vortex at both poles. Scientists try to explain our own bipolar vortex by refering to nearby landmass formations. But the close similarity to Venus means this is false. Something else is the cause, the fact that these bipolar points are over a particular spot is due to random chance.

&hearts Mars has a very thin atmosphere and no clouds so vortex events like on the gas giants or Venus and Earth are not so visible.

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 10:37 am ET
26 November 2001

HAMPTON, VIRGINIA -- NASA's Mars Odyssey has encountered a strange, unexpected phenomenon as it slips over the red planet's north polar region. An intense polar vortex has been detected, causing Mars' atmosphere to be less dense than predicted for that area.

Likened to a jet stream on Earth, the baffling high-latitude, planet-circling vortex is being carefully eyed by scientists.

Again and again, the articles put out by NASA itself expresses astonishment and surprize whenever they 'discover' these damned vortices (vortexi?). It would seem to me, NOT finding one should be the shock. The real issue here is, why didn't some clown at NASA which seems to me to be filled with people who are pretty gullible and easily surprized, why didn't someone use google? Then they would have seen all the other times they used the exact same words to describe the exact same thing!

I would suggest they hire me to be their new press officer. I would pass all news stories through a google filter to see if someone is asleep in the observatory (hahaha, inside joke here). Obviously, the goof-offs on government payroll are not particularily alert so I will now mock them: GADS. You guys make fun of ME???? HAHAHAHA.

&hearts There as a big lightning storm on Saturn, too, this year.

posted: 14 February 2006
01:51 pm ET

Scientists are tracking the strongest lighting storm ever detected at Saturn. The storm is larger than the continental United States, with electrical activity 1,000 times stronger than the lightning on Earth.

Radio outbursts were first detected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft Jan. 23.

Isn't it odd, the way lightning interferes with radio? What is going on here? Why are storms so, er, electrical? Why do we have compasses? And why does the earth flip polarity at irregular but relentless episodic times? Seems it is about to flip yet again for the north pole is wandering all over the place! Is there some connection between lighning storms, polar vortexes, the Van Allen Belt and the sun? Since Venus, a planet that is turning slowly, has these sorts of events, and Earth, a fast turning planet has them, and the giants have them, isn't there some universal rule concerning all this?

&hearts As we learn more about lightning, the questions begin to really pile up!

Lightning not only zaps the Earth, but it affects our local space environment with flashes from both ends of the electromagnetic spectrum – radio waves and gamma rays, new research shows.

"We see lightning in the visible, but that’s not the only frequency that is emitted during a strike," said James Green from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

It has been know for a long time that radio waves accompany lightning – this is why radio reception can be so bad during a thunderstorm.

Green and his colleagues found that some of these radio waves travel into space and clear out a "safe zone" for satellites in between the radiation belts. These belts, which are shaped like donuts around the Earth’s equator, consist of high-energy charged particles – ions and electrons – that travel along our planet’s magnetic field lines.

The earth is a giant dynamo. The magnetic fields reach well out into space. If we were a gas giant, wouldn't these magnetic fields be the 'weather' generator just like on Saturn, Jupiter and the others? Might 'storms' on the poles be more likely an expression of changes in intensity in these magentic fields? Wouldn't this mean that our own gas atmosphere is ruled in part, a great deal, by these same magnetic forces?

Is the ozone hole business really a situation whereby the coming flip in polarity is affecting the gases in the atmosphere and causing them to form an 'eye' just like they have done on Venus and Saturn? Visualizing our own planet's 'invisible' forces as if they were brightly colored might help in understanding why these vortexes form and what is really at work here, not things happening on the 'surface' but things generated by the planet's rotations itself?

One problem with NASA is the lack of new, excited 'blood'. The founders filled their ranks with mavericks and shakers of trees and upsetting apple cartesians. Now, it is filled with people anxious to please each other and anyone with any new ideas is locked out because it is scary. Who wants to go to a meeting where everyone is going to be arguing, throwing things, sneering at each other and in general, acting up. Better to sleep walk! Agree! Feel comfy and happy.

&hearts Click here to read a recent report on the hiring situation at NASA.

&hearts Click here to read about the lack of job opportunities for young astronomers and how the lack of jobs leads to everyone struggling to please the aging, increasingly hidebound older ranks.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Huge Solar Flare Hitting Today

Elaine Meinel Supkis

One would think the news of a very violent eruption on the sun would be front page news. I scan all the news wires all the time and on Dec. 6th, there was a 'tsunami' solar flare events that shook the surface of our local star but this didn't make any headline news outside of the astronomy community. The sun isn't totally stable and certainly not in the last 6 million years, is it stable, this coincides with the evolution of humans who needed big brains to cope with the changes wrought by the instability of the sun. What is going on here?

&hearts I often visit the various NASA 'space weather' sites but not on a daily basis, a mistake I now acknowledge.

The largest electromagnetic energy emission in the last 30 years has been recorded on the Sun, the Shernberg State Astronomy Institute said on Thursday. This energy outburst may damage equipment of space satellites, the scientists say. Doctors warn that the emission is dangerous for those afflicted with cardiovascular illnesses as well as for healthy people.

Scientists at the Shernberg Astronomy Institute of the Moscow State University have reported record-high emissions of electromagnetic energy on the Sun, the biggest since the 1970s. Over the past few days, the volume of sun radiation, or X9, has exceeded the normal level 1,000-fold. The scientists call this phenomenon an anomaly and say that the Sun is now in a stage when sunspots, sources of high electromagnetic radiation, are unusual. “Outbursts on the Sun like this have been extremely infrequent over the past 30 years,” said Igor Nikulin of the Shernberg Institute. “What is more, we have never had a chance to observe such emissions with the sun at its minimal activity.”

Scientists say that the first indications of increased solar activity were recorded on Monday when four sunspots appeared on the eastern part of the visible side of the solar disk. First, the scientists observed flashes on the Sun which were classified as moderate. However, the flashes were followed on Tuesday by massive outbursts of electromagnetic energy. “Such a large cloud of hot plasma has been released into space that even electronic equipment on space satellites may be damaged,” Vladimir Matveev at the Moscow Aviation Institute says.

Um, I too, have noticed the 'quiet' period in the 20 year cycle isn't very quiet this time around. The 11 year cycle is rather elastic, we know of it only in recent times, scientists examining ice cores have discovered there is considerable flux in the sun's activities, for example, 36,000 years ago, there was a considerable outburst. The best place to be when this sort of activity hammers the earth is a cave. Heh.

But seriously, people have this habit of taking the sun for granted. The whole global warming issue hinges on what the sun does. If the sun shuts down sunspot activity and there is less energy output, we get some really cold weather here, global warming or not. But if humans increase CO2 while the sun is increasing its own activities, then we get runaway global warming.

&hearts Click here to see this solar flar in action:

SOLAR TSUNAMI: When sunspot 930 exploded on Dec. 6th, producing an X6-category flare, it also created a tsunami-like shock wave that rolled across the face of the sun, wiping out filaments and other structures in its path. An H-alpha telescope in New Mexico operated by the National Solar Observatory (NSO) recorded the action:

When the great North America blackout happened, it was simultaneous with the second wave of energy hitting the earth during a solar flare event that was very big and aimed right at us. These flares can cause all sorts of mayhem with electrical grids. The electrical forces surrounding the planets and working within the solar system is still little understood. Just recently, astronomers have decided there are huge lightning events in Saturn's rings, for example. We use electricity while not truly appreciating its true nature.

Lightning is just one manifestation of this energy. I am hyper-aware of this, of course. Solar flares have a huge effect on us all, much of it not so obvious because it is 'invisible' except for our modern observation equipment. I remember the building of the Kitt Peak Solar Observatory. It was built right next to Turtle Rock (we named it, heh). Turtle Rock doesn't see any more children climbing all over it because they fenced it off (Grrrr). Anyway, I used to play inside that observatory and I remember the crude method for watching sun spot activity: it was a big table that showed sunspots as small shadows. One could see how many and where they were and track them as the sun rotated but that was about it!

Now we can see the sun much better and the displays we see are awe inspiring and frankly, scary. Namely, we know all stars die. We know the sun is very, very old, one third of the length of the universe, old. So the next step is to understand our time isn't unlimited.

&hearts Today, the proton wave will hit us.

December 08 2318 UTC EXTENDED WARNING: Proton 10MeV Integral Flux above 10pfu expected

&hearts Here is an older story about an older solar flare storm that would have, if it occured today, wiped out much of our electrical grid.

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 06:00 am ET
27 October 2003

A pair of strong solar storms that hit Earth late last week were squalls compared to the torrent of electrons that rained down in the "perfect space storm" of 1859. And sooner or later, experts warn, the Sun will again conspire again send earthlings a truly destructive bout of space weather.

If it happens anytime soon, we won't know exactly what to expect until it's over, and by then some modern communication systems could be like beachfront houses after a hurricane.

In early September in 1859, telegraph wires suddenly shorted out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires. Colorful aurora, normally visible only in polar regions, were seen as far south as Rome and Hawaii.

The event 144 years ago was three times more powerful than the strongest space storm in modern memory, one that cut power to an entire Canadian province in 1989. A new account of the 1859 event, from research led by Bruce Tsurutani of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, details the most powerful onslaught of solar energy in recorded history.

144 years ago, the 'Little Ice Age' ended with great suddeness. Looking at the data of all the Ice Ages, the suddeness of them ending is a common feature. The clock-work like fashion of this is pretty strong. The only thing that 'changes' is solar output! This time around, we should be leaving the interglacial and going into another sudden Ice Age event only we aren't and this is clearly due to the sun's activity levels coupled with an unusual event: a significant change in the atmosphere's composition.

Even as forests are chopped down and deserts are growing ever larger and plankton is dying due to hotter oceans, the CO2 is rising because humans are releasing all that pent-up organic energy trapped in the earth by geological forces.

&hearts Since I am talking about pretty scary stuff today, I might as well talk about our galaxy's own black hole.

Verification (1997): Astrophysicists detected a strong gamma ray pulse arriving from a galaxy billions of light years away having a redshift of 3.4 (see Prediction No. 10 below). Mainstream media, such as Sky & Telescope magazine, suggested that this gamma ray pulse may be accompanied by a volley of high energy cosmic ray particles travelling at very close to the speed of light along a rectilinear trajectory and that the gamma ray pulse is produced by the radial outward movement of this volley. In effect, they were restating the same Galactic superwave idea that LaViolette had proposed 14 years earlier in the face of stiff resistance from mainstream astronomers.

Verification (2000): Radio astronomers announce at the January 2000 American Astronomical Society meeting that the synchrotron radio emission radiated from the Galactic center (Sgr A*) is circularly polarized. Scientists present at the meeting concurred with Dr. LaViolette's suggestion that the circular polarization indicated that cosmic ray electrons were travelling radially away from the Galactic center along straight-line trajectories.

*snip*

Verification (1981 - 82): LaViolette was the first to measure the extraterrestrial material content of prehistoric polar ice. Using the neutron activation analysis technique, he found high levels of iridium and nickel in 6 out of the 8 polar ice dust samples (35k to 73k yrs BP), an indication that they contain high levels of cosmic dust. This showed that Galactic superwaves may have affected our solar system in the recent past. In addition, he discovered gold in one 50,000 year old sample, making this the first time gold had been discovered in polar ice.

La Violette is a controversial scientist. As usual, this means the people in charge of defending the Temple of Knowledge will fight tooth and nail. But the truth is, thanks to our space observatories, we now know 'quiet' galatic centers suddenly get 'active' when they swallow stellar material! &hearts This week, NASA reported that one galaxy suddenly had interesting flares out of the core as it 'ate' a star.

Images from Chandra, XMM-Newton and earlier images from the German Roentgen satellite ROSAT detected a strong X-ray eruption from the middle of galaxy RX J1242-11. The black hole was estimated to have had a mass of about 100 million times the Earth's Sun. In comparison, the star had a mass that was about equal to the Sun. In the pull of gravity battle between the two, the smaller star lost.

Astronomers estimate that only about 1 percent of the star's mass was swallowed by the black hole. Most of it was catapulted into the galaxy in the form of dust and gas. The outburst was caused by the gas from the obliterated star being super-heated to millions of degrees Celsius, before being swallowed by the black hole. The energy released was equivalent to a supernova and considered one of the most intense ever detected in a galaxy.

All galactic cores are eating stellar material. Whenever a large-ish object falls into these black holes, the whole galaxy is affected by the violent reaction. And since our solar system was sucked into the Milky Way galaxy, we got bombarded every time something falls into the core, the wishful thinking of astronomers, that the Milky Way is a 'quiet' galaxy by nature is false, it is quiet only in between feasts and as it sucks in smaller galaxies, this increases the chance that surrounding stars that have been circling the drain for eons, will get 'bumped' into the core and explode.

This always affectes our sun and our own home planet. The powerful forces unleashed by these regular events travel at the speed of light to strike our own home. We know these sorts of cosmic events affects our DNA as well as our climate. Despite this and thanks to the atmosphere that sheaths the planet, living things have managed to survive. One thing some astronomers suspect is these events outside the solar system also bump stuff from the outermost perimeters. Namely, there is an awful lot of loose 'dirt' out there, we can't see much of our own galaxy on the visual spectrum thanks to sheets of 'dust' that varies in size dramatically, stuff that is 'loose' and which also protects us from the full fury of the black hole in the center whose 'eating' activities can be very violent indeed.

Thanks to the solar observatories and Chandra space observatory, we now know a tremendous amount more about the nature of stars, the actions of black holes and how the less visible parts of the spectrum hide a tremendous amount of information that clearly shows a universe that is....eating itself!

Which takes me back to the entire concept of the Big Bang: how can the universe be flying apart 'faster and faster' when it is clearly falling TOWARDS whatever has the bigger black hole potential?

And don't forget to wear a lead hat today or stay in a cave. The bears don't worry, they are hibernating in caves. Home, sweet home.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Ancient Greek Navigational Tool Amazes Everyone

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Using various scientific devices, researchers were able to reconstruct an ancient astronomical calculator which was made during the height of ancient Greek astronomy. It evidently was used by sea captains. Seafarers have always used the stars most intently because there are few landmarks visible when one is at sea, especially at night. The Greek astronomers were mystics who believed the universal truth was really numbers, not 'things'. Some interesting thoughts about that.

&hearts I am not surprised, they made such a complex calculator.

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- An ancient astronomical calculator made at the end of the 2nd century BC was amazingly accurate and more complex than any instrument for the next 1,000 years, scientists said on Wednesday.

The Antikythera Mechanism is the earliest known device to contain an intricate set of gear wheels. It was retrieved from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901 but until now what it was used for has been a mystery.

Although the remains are fragmented in 82 brass pieces, scientists from Britain, Greece and the United States have reconstructed a model of it using high-resolution X-ray tomography.

They believe their findings could force a rethink of the technological potential of the ancient Greeks.

"It could be described as the first known calculator," said Professor Mike Edmunds, a professor of astrophysics at Cardiff University in Wales.

"Our recent work has applied very modern techniques that we believe have now revealed what its actual functions were."

The calculator could add, multiply, divide and subtract. It was also able to align the number of lunar months with years and display where the sun and the moon were in the zodiac.

Edmunds and his colleagues discovered it had a dial that predicted when there was likely to be a lunar or solar eclipse. It also took into account the elliptical orbit of the moon.

The history of astronomy, calculations, math and systems for tracking planets and people is a fascinating, deep subject. I come from several generations of mathematicians/astronomers/surveyors and it is an abiding passion with us, the strange connection between integers and infinity. Namely, how could it be possible for all things in the 'real' world to function on an astounding scale of ratios which can be expressed as named units that are imaginary? Why does Nature have this passion for proportion? Indeed, She loves them so much, She makes them into Iron Rules which scientists call 'theorums.'

&hearts This Greek device was built on the foundation of thousands of years of astronomy done with really crude tools.

They got the date wrong by some 3,000 years, but the oldest detailed drawing of Stonehenge, apparently based on first hand observation, has turned up in a 15th century manuscript.

The little sketch is a bird's eye view of the stones, and shows the great trilithons, the biggest stones in the monument, each made of two pillars capped with a third stone lintel, which stand in a horseshoe in the centre of the circle. Only three are now standing, but the drawing, found in Douai, northern France, suggests that in the 15th century four of the original five survived.

I believe astronomy is as old as homo sapiens if not older. When humanity didn't live in caves or tents even, they lived outside, in nature, out of the enclosing jungle, out on the vast plains or by the oceans. We know humans ventured out to sea at least 50,000 years ago because that is how they got to Australia, for example. I happen to think our affinity for the ocean is why we evolved virtually no body hair except the sketchiest amount, except for the top of the head and sexual sites, namely the crotch and armpits (hair there transmits sexual information which is why we love underarm deoderants!). We have funny body fat like on our breasts for the females, all very water-oriented.

Anyway, the accumulation of star/sun/moon information took off when the ancient people of the world's peskiest place, Iraq, decided to invent writing using a stick and some mud. This way, they could write notations while observing the stars. This meant accumlated observations could be tallied and cross-checked. The ancient Egyptians had a more stable environment and passed on data via memorization within the huge temple complexes there but the cross-fertilization of the Mesopotamian information with the Egyptian data meant the Greeks, when they pulled out of barbarism, could pick apart and remesh all this data and impose on it all, a new philosophical structure.

This revolution was expressed by creating amazing works of art, the history of the nude is all about the Greek quest welding naturalism within a mathematical/ratio oriented structure to create the ideal humanist god. Renaissance artists fought furious battles to regain this secret knowledge and they understood it was based in science but the urge to simply explode outwards was overwhelming which is why the great nude, 'David' by Michelangelo's proportions eddy and bulge rather violently as if the artist was fighting the entire concept. It certainly makes a dynamo of a statement as a statue.

But the restrictions of ratios expressed as proportions which was the basis for Classicism haunt us. One thing people used to like to imagine was, this obsession of the Classic Greek culture was just so much hot air. But increasingly, close analysis of the remains of this culture show, they were very aware of the philosophy that was the skelton of the graceful body of all the works of this time and far from being disinterested in making equipment and tools to use scientifically, they did do this, it is just, after their culture was conquered and digested by the Romans and then everything collapsed LONG before the empire fell, these tools were simply discarded, melted down or broken apart.

Enough bedraggled fragments survived for the rising Islamic empire to save (Christian rioters are the thugs who burned the famous Alexandrian library) a enough to give us a faint idea of the amazing minds of the Greek democratic empires. So, far from being surprised by this sophisticated instrument, we should be sad that so much is still missing from that great collapse.

&hearts Click here for information about a Prague clock that is the earliest Northern European calculator/sun/moon/planet tracking mechanism built in the 1400s.

The Sphere or clock dial is the central part of the Orloj and represents the astronomical phenomena such as sunrise and sunset, ancient Czech and present day time, movements of the Sun and the Moon and other relative celestial configurations.

The dial shows three mutually independent movements:
the mean revolutions of the Sun,
the mean revolutions of the Moon
and the apparent revolutions of the stars (the ecliptic, to be more precise).

Some of the greatest earliest astronomers of Europe arose in the Bohemian mountains. They worked together with metallurgists and the makers of clocks to create a culture of scientific experiment and exploration. It is an interesting sideline how cultures suddenly coalence, Greece at this time, was sinking into dotage, the days of glory so dim and so distraught, they really didn't care for it at all.

Bohemia, on the other hand, was a howling wilderness with illiterate savages during and after the Roman Empire tried to conquer it all (failing). &hearts Except even these early savages wondered about the sun and moon and tried to make machines or guides to help them track things!

The 3,600-year-old Sky Disc of Nebra, discovered four years ago when German grave robbers tried to sell it on the international market, indicates Bronze Age man had a sophisticated sense of time, The Times of London reported Thursday.

"We have been dramatically underestimating the prehistoric peoples," said Harald Meller, chief archaeologist of Saxony-Anhalt, where the disc was found.

The bronze disc is nearly 12 inches in diameter with a blue-green patina and inlaid with a gold sun, moon and 32 stars.

Grave robbers using metal detectors found it in 1999 alongside a pile of bronze axes and swords in a deep forest at the Nebra settlement, The Times reported.

Since the disk's recovery, archaeologists and astronomers had been trying to discover its function. Astronomer Ralph Hansen determined the disc was an attempt to co-ordinate the solar and lunar calendars to tell Bronze Age Man when to plant seeds and when to make trades, giving him an almost modern sense of time, The Times of London said.

We suspect 35,000 years ago, humans used the antlers of deer to scratch the lunar cycles. Understanding the cycles of the sun and moon has been literally life and death for humans, the more we understood, the better our chances of surviving the winter/summer/ice age cycles.

Speaking of humans conquering, here is Hawkins in the news this week, talking about future ability to understand the mysteries of the universe, a quest humanity has been on for thousands of years.

By Arifa Akbar
Published: 01 December 2006

Stephen Hawking warned that future generations would need to leave the planet to ensure the survival of the species as he picked up a prestigious scientific accolade yesterday.

Professor Hawking, 64, a mathematics professor at the University of Cambridge, said space rockets using the kind of technology seen in Star Trek would be needed to colonise hospitable planets.

*snip*

In an interview with BBC Radio 4, he said scientists may be within 20 years of reaching the prediction in his book, A Brief History of Time, that mankind would one day "know the mind of God" by understanding the laws governing the universe.

For the longest time, humans think they can 'know the mind of God' via numbers. A side effect of this belief is the idea that numbers influence rather than express Nature, aka, God. Out of this sprang the secret magic numbers business I keep noting. People who believe in the utility of magic numbers in order to not just reveal the mind of God but to dictate the God's future actions is extremely ancient.

&hearts Even the Greek Pythagorians thought they could do this to some degree.

Pythagoras started a secret society called the Pythagorean brotherhood devoted to the study of mathematics. This had a great effect on future esoteric traditions such as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, both of which were occult groups dedicated to the study of mathematics, and both of which evolved out of the Pythagorean brotherhood. The mystical and occult qualities of Pythagorean mathematics are discussed in a chapter of Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages entitled Pythagorean Mathematics.

Pythagorean theory was tremendously influential on later numerology, which was extremely popular throughout the Middle East in the ancient world. 8th century Islamic alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan, inventor of numerous important chemical processes still in use today, grounded his work in an elaborate numerology greatly influenced by Pythagorean theory.

When I was a very little girl, I seriously tried to write the equation for delivering prayers to God. I finally decided, after many attempts, to simply explain what I wanted to Pegasus and have him fly off and deliver the messages. This didn't work, either. Horses are very self-centered and even if you give them golden apples, they still go off and graze somewhere or run around, having fun and completely forget what was so important to the humans. Since no one has figured out how to circumvent this, they decided to leave Pegasus in charge of poetry and philosophy and then leave him alone.

&hearts Numerology as a way of creating a new reality is very potent in the minds of humans seeking power.

Historians believe that modern numerology is an integration of the teachings from Ancient Babylonia, Pythagoras and his followers, (6th century B.C. Greece) Astrological philosophy from Hellenistic Alexandria, early Christian mysticism, the occultism of the early Gnostics and the Hebrew system of the Kabbalah. The Indian Vedas, the Chinese "Circle of the Dead",and the Egyptian "Book of the Master of the Secret House", (Ritual of the Dead) are records giving strong evidence that Numerology dates back thousands of years.
Pythagoras and other philosophers of the time believed that because mathematical concepts were more "practical" (easier to regulate and classify) than physical ones, they had greater actuality. This is an idea in harmony with philosophical pragmatism and a choice for permanent concepts over changeable physicality.

St. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354 - 430) wrote " Numbers are the Universal language offered by the deity to humans as confirmation of the truth." Similar to Pythagoras, he too believed that everything had numerical relationships and it was up to the mind to seek and investigate the secrets of these relationships or have them revealed by divine grace.

In 325 A.D., following the First Council of Nicaea, departures from the beliefs of the state Church were classified as civil violations within the Roman Empire. Numerology had not found favor with the Christian authority of the day. It was assigned to the field of unapproved beliefs along with astrology and other forms of divination and "magic." Through this religious purging, the spiritual significance assigned to the heretofore "sacred" numbers began to disappear. In spite of this suppression there were still many devout believers, who kept the secret knowledge locked away.

&hearts All of this is leading up to this bizarre article I found when I was chasing down a totally different story last night:

USS Dwight D. Eisenhower was authorized by Congress in fiscal year 1970. The carrier, named after the nation's 34th president, was christened at 11:11 a.m., Oct. 11, 1975, by Mrs. Mamie Doud-Eisenhower, the ship's sponsor and widow of the late president. IKE was commissioned on Oct. 18, 1977 and assigned to the Atlantic Fleet. After 14 months of fleet training, IKE set sail for her first Mediterranean deployment.

Grrr. All big terrorist attacks aimed at propelling us into war occur on magic number days, they use magic number planes and hit magic number buildings (in NYC, even TV stations joked about how the Twin Towers were the number 11). So reading the details of the launch of the Eisenhower which is, right now, offshore from Iran, menacing Iran and daring them to sink it (and they will succeed in sinking it if pushed!) made me laugh sardonically.

It is a ship encased in magic numbers. I bet, throughout the blueprint, there are a zillion magic numbers embedded in it, I assure you, dear readers, knowing the desire for and love of magic numbers these people have,enables one to see the future since these numbers always fall into a particular pattern and grid. 11 is a very very favorite and quite magical number for these guys. Like 333, it is important to them. This crude form of magic grew out of the Greek philospher's quest for understanding the mind of God. And these humans trying to be magicians want God to give them power and glory and victory. Especially victory. They want to be better than God, giver of life and death.

Which is why the Skull and Bones frat rats chant to the Devil that is Death.

This is probably why Pegasus deliberately refuses to enlighten us or deliver those messages. He is smart enough to know, we are lucky to get poems and songs instead. Allowing us to hear a Stradivarius violin or touch a Greek nude should tide us over. It is more than we deserve, frankly.

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