Re:Solar superflares hit Earth multiple times
by patwolf on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @12:10PM
(#30165665)
How much time would elapse from the point of seeing the sunspot until the flare/CME actually occurs?
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Re:Solar superflares hit Earth multiple times
by superkuh on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @12:50PM
(#30166315)
Hard to say. For a "super" event the sunspot group might be noticibly big right after it appears and flare during the emergence which would mean a ~day or two warning all the way up to a long established group slowly growing over an entire rotation around the sun and coming back to flare and/or erupt ~29 days later.
Re:Solar superflares hit Earth multiple times
by Filligree on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @01:15PM
(#30166687)
So, does that mean we'd have time to shut off our power grid and disconnect any long lines of metal?
AIUI, it's only a problem if sufficiently long wires are actually connected to vulnerable equipment.
Re:Solar superflares hit Earth multiple times
by superkuh on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @02:11PM
(#30167560)
Yes. But I think there'd be a lot of political/social problems with that. The solution for the grid at least is to spend the infrastructure money to put fast ground fault interrupters on all irreplacable (<months) big backbone transformers.