The SOHO satellite, placed in orbit between Earth and the sun in late 1995, has been capturing images of the sun’s surface and monitoring its activity. It monitors solar storms generated by the Sun, which spews electromagnetically charged particles that spread across Earth and all other planets in our solar system. These images show the sun at the minimum and maximum in its energetic activity.
The Sun’s magnetic poles shift every 11.2 years and are believed to strongly influence Earth’s magnetic poles. You may recall from a little earlier that it takes Galactic Center 11 minutes to make a complete revolution. These kinds of mathematical harmonics are another factor indicating that the universe was created by an intelligent force.
If you were watching the space news in 2003, you saw that Earth was bombarded with energy from round after round of sunspots and solar flares that created intense electromagnetic storms. During late October and early November of that year, for example, ten powerful solar flares kicked up extreme doses of X-rays and other radiation, along with slower-moving storms of charged particles. These gigantic eruptions were the largest ever recorded in our history. The magnetic clouds of plasma become 30 million miles wide by the time it reaches earth.
These flares create solar winds that distorts the Earth’s magnetosphere, causing magnetic storms that can disrupt communications and navigational equipment, damage satellites, and even cause blackouts. These solar winds distend the magnetosphere of the Earth and everything living on it. Some of this energy slammed squarely into Earth, hampering radio communications, forcing the FAA to divert airline traffic away from polar routes, which are exposed to higher radiation doses, and crippling two Japanese satellites. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station were forced to take cover multiple times in protected areas.
In this image, you can see the eruption, the solar winds that it generates, where they hit Earth’s atmosphere and how it distorts Earth’s electromagnetic atmosphere.
The image below with the Sun blocked out shows the two primary kinds of solar eruptions. Solar Pominences, the loop-like images at the top and the pointed Coronal Mass Ejections, which are more commonly known as sunspots.
Prominences are made of hot, dense gas held aloft by solar magnetic force fields. Sometimes they collapse and explode . . . More often they remain aloft for days or even weeks and then sink gently back into the sun.
You can see how massive they are in this image, more than five times taller than Earth. During eruptions on the Sun, such as those in November 2003, expanding clouds of charged particles from sunspots raced into space. The energy in a few of these eruptions moved abnormally quickly, reaching Earth in less than a day. One set a new space speed record of 5 million mph. It was the largest speed ever measured in space of a gas stream emitted from the surface of the Sun.
More recent reports from this site indicate the the sun has been in a period of extremely low activity. “We’re experiencing a very deep solar minimum,” says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is the quietest sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Pesnell believes sunspot counts will pick up again soon, “possibly by the end of the year,” to be followed by a solar maximum of below-average intensity in 2012 or 2013.