Today, we're going to take a little break from the seemingly endless series about Martian spiders (previous installments being numbers one, two and three), to revisit a recent post about the wonders and dangers of the Electromagnetic Pulse. Among other things. Atomic bombs can cause an EMP but there are even worse side effects from those, y'know.

Anyway there's a reason for coming back to this right now. If you want to refresh your memory (or mine! Yeah, I had to look it up) the previous article is this one: How to Fry Your Circuits Without Really Trying. The super overly simple summary is that high energy bursts of electromagnetic energy are bad for technological devices. At the low end, they might generate some static on your radio for a few seconds. At the high end, your radio might catch fire. Somewhere in the middle, circuits short out and things stop working.

Hopefully you remember that one of the biggest sources of electromagnetic shenanigans, is the Sun. Let's add some detail to that.

The Sun isn't just a big glowy ball. It's furiously active. The surface, which averages a brisk 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, rotates. Threads of magnetic force build and snap and sometimes explode. Huge gouts of plasma burst from the surface, crashing back with a monstrous splash. A lot of that is hard to see from here, of course. But we have cameras outside the atmosphere now.

You've probably heard of sunspots, right? These are (relatively) small regions of darkness that appear on the sun's surface. Or, according to Wikipedia, "Sunspots are temporary spots on the Sun's surface that are darker than the surrounding area. They are regions of reduced surface temperature caused by concentrations of magnetic flux that inhibit convection¹." They get carried along by the Sun's rotation, meaning there are some we don't see because they're on the other side of the Sun. Don't read anything into that, though. Unless you believe there's an alternate Earth running in the same orbit as ours but exactly on the other side of the Sun. Then, feel free to make up a conspiracy theory about all the sunspots we can't see.

Some sunspots have stronger magnetic fields than others. Sometimes one will send out a little solar flare. Once in a while, it sends out a big one. Sometimes, it sends out what's called a Coronal Mass Ejection. "Coronal mass" is a fancy way of saying gas from the outside of the Sun. Most of these flares are pointed away from the Earth because the Sun is a LOT bigger than Earth, which is also a moving target. But this stuff hits us surprisingly often. When it does, we get things like Aurora Borealis or, once in a long while, the Carrington Event. I mentioned that in that other post. It was a bigger deal than people knew at the time.

Wanna know why? It was a big deal because it showed that we had built infrastructure that was vulnerable to unpredictable natural forces by amplifying them. A tornado or a flood will wipe out everything in it's path. But an electromagnetic spike might go completely unnoticed except for the bits of technology (and people who use them) that channel its power and then is destroyed by it. If the tech in question is a telegraph key, having it catch fire could be inconvenient but that's all. If it's the plane you happen to be inside of at the moment, you might have a problem.

And that's where we get to the "update" part of this post. In the last few days, the Sun has fired off multiple good sized flares that are coming right straight at the Earth. BY the time you read this, most of them will have already hit. Two of those flares were X-class flares². One was an X7.1, which is really big. Another was an X9.1, which is a **&%*! monster. I asked ChatGPT to explain the classification system and this is what it said:

Solar flares are classified based on their intensity in X-ray wavelengths, specifically in the 1 to 8 Angstrom range, as measured by the GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites) system. The classification scheme is divided into five major categories: A, B, C, M, and X. Each class represents a tenfold increase in energy output compared to the previous one, with subcategories marked by numbers from 1 to 9 to indicate further gradations of intensity within each class.

X-rays?!? Okay then.

By the way, by comparison, the Carrington Event was said to be around an X45, give or take about 5. That’s … really big. As far as we can tell, there hasn't been another one that big since³. So if you own a telegraph key, don't worry about leaving it hooked up tonight.

Before I forget, we also had some M-class flares coming at us this weekend. According to the above definition, an M class flare is one-tenth as powerful as an X. So you don't need to worry unless there's 10 or more of them at once. Don't ask me what you get with 10 or more X-class flares at once. An all expense paid trip to the 18th century?

We're getting all kinds of flares at once because the Sun is currently in a period of what's called "Solar Maximum." Sunspots and solar flares run in cycles. Maximum is the peak. There's also a minimum. From peak to peak (or trough to trough) generally takes about 11 years. I read a paper a while back^[A paper I was too lazy to bookmark.] saying that there's also a bigger cycle. That every 11 cycles, the peaks get peakier and the troughs get troughier. Deeper. Something. And right now, we're pretty close to the top of that cycle, too.

Of course, by that reasoning wouldn't Carrington have been 121 years ago? But really it was about 165 years ago. We're overdue!

What would an update post be without a mention of the Boeing Starliner fiasco? As you'll recall, the last time we checked in, Starliner had returned to Earth empty, leaving the two astronauts who went up to the International Space Station in it, stuck. Well, the Space X rocket that's going to bring them home has arrived at the ISS. But it's not going to bring them back yet. Apparently, the ship was already planned to be there, meaning they'll have to wait until the previously scheduled trip back. In February. 2025.

Do they get paid overtime for the extra few months? Just wondering.

Here's that prompt: "A comical scene of the Sun as seen from space with Earth visible in the background. The Sun is very active with large sunspots and solar flares bursting out. A rocket ship, wearing oversized sunglasses, is flying toward the Sun, looking carefree and relaxed despite the danger. The overall atmosphere is friendly and lighthearted, with exaggerated, cartoonish flares and playful expressions on both the rocket and the Sun."