tommyknocker wrote:

Stinger wrote:

Mike,

Here it is (the way I understand it).

I've scanned those e-mails (and some of the sites as well) and the gist of
the thing seems to be that they are using X-Ray emissions to measure how
significant these flares are (and whether or not they're going to fry
satellites). They assign an "X" with a digit as their shorthand to describe
the relative strength of the flare. The consensus is an "X-20" is a pretty
big one that can play havoc with power grids and long-range radio reception.

However, another problem they have is that the orbital equipment they're
using to measure these events can be overloaded by a truly big solar event.
The satellite was overloaded and was not able to measure the really big
flare last week, so they're having to rely on more subjective measures to
try to figure out its real strength. I've seen numbers as high as X-45 for
that one.

Going further, there are two schools of thought on these recent solar
events.

The first is that the sun has been about three years overdue to have a major
sunspot/flare cycle (they occur about every twelve years), and it is finally
happening, just a little later than expected.

The other (from the Art Bell crowd) is that the sun is being pelted by
larger and larger comets foreshadowing the incoming orbit of a previously
unknown planet (Planet X -- yeah, I know -- another "X") that drops into our
solar neighborhood every three thousand years.

I just know radio reception has been really spotty for the past three or so
weeks ;^)

-- Stinger

I saw an article on alt.conspiracy apparently written by Whitley
Strieber (the guy who wrote postapocalyptic novels before becoming an
alien contactee). The basic gist of it was that a burst of some sort of
energy from the core of the galaxy hit our sun, stopping the sun's
magnetic field from entirely flipping over like it should have. This is
allowing cosmic dust into our solar system, thus making the sun more
unstable. He said that the 11 year solar cycle has been disrupted which
will cause the end of civilization and etc. The article predicted that
solar flares would keep increasing in number and intensity. (But as
Tomas noted we've only been keeping records for 30 years, so there's a
lot we don't know.)

I suppose he (Strieber) got this information from his alien contacts. I
think we should assume that solar events like the recent flares have
occurred thousands of times during the sun's lifetime of at least
4-billion years. Since our lives are so short in comparison, we have a
tendency to see such things as being new in the history of the sun, when
in fact they are just new to us. To put it another way, given the huge
age discrepancy between the sun and human lives, what are the odds that
our sun has started a new phase in it's life just when we have developed
the capability to observe these events with our science? I'd say those
odds are slim to nil.


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