What effect do solar flares do on earth?

Answer 1

Auroras

Answer 2

Solar flares can make communication by radio and telephone difficult at times.

The earth itself is strongly protected by its magnetic field. When there is a great deal of solar activity we experience this as a beautiful display of Aurora Borealis reaching out from the North and Aurora Australis reaching out from the south. The more active the sun is, the further away from earth's magnetic poles this light will be visible in the sky.

Sometimes the ionic particles from the sun are of such a strength that they will saturate the electronics on board various satellites. This will interfere with satellite communication and we might lose TV signals or even phone connections. The ionic particles can in some cases destroy parts of a satellite's electronics and cause it to malfunction.

There is little to indicate that this radiation from the sun is of any danger to electronics located down on earth..

A massive solar super storm could possibly penetrate the earth's magnetic shielding to a certain extent and cause problems with ordinary electronics. This fortunately does not happen very often and would most likely render quite a few of our satellites useless.

One day if the worst come to the worst and we do have a solar super storm, then I will just be outside watching the sky and letting myself be fascinated by this amazing show from the twin auroras. They might even be visible in daylight.

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In 1870, a severe solar storm (there were actually a series of these throughout the 1870s) caused such an intense inductive current in long telegraph wires that operators no longer needed to connect their systems to batteries in order to send telegrams. In a couple of cases, the induced current was high enough to start fires in the telegraph offices!

Particles in the sun can affect power lines on the earth in the same way and there have been 2 large power outages attributed to solar activity. These are somewhat predictable and the solution is usually to distribute the power better so that long power lines don't need to carry as much power. In other words have as many power plants on line as possible during these events.

The radiation from solar flares is deadly to people above the earth's magnetic shield and above the atmosphere for example astronauts travelling to the moon, on the moon, travelling to Mars or on Mars need heavy shielding to survive a strong solar storm.

Answer 3

X-rays and UV radiation emitted by solar flares can affect Earth's ionosphere and disrupt long-range radio communications. Direct radio emission at decimetric wavelengths may disturb operation of radars and other devices operating at these frequencies.

Answer 4

A solar flare is a sudden brightening observed over the Sun's surface or the solar limb, which is interpreted as a large energy release of up to 6 × 1025 joules of energy (about a sixth of the total energy output of the Sun each second or 160,000,000,000 megatons of TNT equivalent, over 25,000 times more energy than released from the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter). They are mainly followed by a colossal coronal mass ejection also known as a CME.[1] The flare ejects clouds of electrons, ions, and atoms through the corona of the sun into space. These clouds typically reach Eartha day or two after the event.[2] The term is also used to refer to similar phenomena in other stars, where the term stellar flareapplies.

Solar flares affect all layers of the solar atmosphere (photosphere, chromosphere, and corona), when the plasma medium is heated to tens of millions of kelvins the electrons, protons, and heavier ions are accelerated to near the speed of light. They produce radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum at all wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma rays, although most of the energy is spread over frequencies outside the visual range and for this reason the majority of the flares are not visible to the naked eye and must be observed with special instruments. Flares occur in active regions around sunspots, where intense magnetic fields penetrate the photosphere to link the corona to the solar interior. Flares are powered by the sudden (timescales of minutes to tens of minutes) release of magnetic energy stored in the corona. The same energy releases may produce coronal mass ejections (CME), although the relation between CMEs and flares is still not well established.

X-rays and UV radiation emitted by solar flares can affect Earth's ionosphere and disrupt long-range radio communications. Direct radio emission at decimetric wavelengths may disturb operation of radars and other devices operating at these frequencies.

Solar flares were first observed on the Sun by Richard Christopher Carrington and independently by Richard Hodgson in 1859[3] as localized visible brightenings of small areas within a sunspot group. Stellar flares have also been observed on a variety of other stars.

The frequency of occurrence of solar flares varies, from several per day when the Sun is particularly "active" to less than one every week when the Sun is "quiet", following the 11-year cycle (the solar cycle). Large flares are less frequent than smaller ones.