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March 10
th
, 2012
It was just over 152.5 years ago that our Blue Marble was attacked by aspurious outburst from our friendly heater located some 93 million miles away,and attack that normally takes 3-4 days, zipped through space in 17-hours andcaused some pretty serious events on our home.During September 1
st
-2
nd
the largest recorded “geo-magnetic storm”slammed into our planet causing the earth’s magnetic shield to twist andbubble like it had not in our recorded history, being observed with outstandingbrilliance as far south as the Caribbean, exploding with such brightness towake miners from their deep slumber in the Rocky Mountains, some whobegan preparing breakfast thinking it was morning. Across the northeasternUSA citizens were able to read the morning newspaper by the “aurora’s” light. The Internet of the day, our telegraph systems failed across Europe andNorth America, with sparks jumping from insulator to insulator, pylon to pylon,and in some instances paper laying near the “key” on the desks caught fire,and in some locations the media continue to function even thought thebatteries had been damaged between the locations.It was at 11:18 AM (GMT) on the morning of the 1
st
of September that 33-year-old Richard Carrington of a well appointed family, first observed someunusual sunspot activity, in his up-to-date private observatory, where histelescope was projecting an 11” wide image of the Sun on a screen –heimmediately on taking up his graphite pencil set to sketching an image. Whathe was noting was the gathering or coming together of an enormous group of sunspots, glancing from time-to-time as his pencil flew across the paper henoticed two brilliant beads of blinding light appear over the sunspots,intensifying rapidly, and morphing into a kidney-shaped image.
 
He noted later, “being somewhat flurriedby the surprise, I hastily ran to callsomeone to witness the exhibition withme, on returning within 60 seconds, I wasmortified to find that it was already muchchanged and enfeeble”. He and hiswitness watched the “white spots”contract to mere pinpoints and disappear. There had only been around 5 minutes – itwas now 11:23 AM. They had witnessed the birth of a
coronal mass ejection,“CME”.
 Just before dawn the next day (the CME traveling at some 5.48 mil mph),reached our heavens and all over planet Earth erupting in red, green, andpurple “auroras”, were so brilliant and powerful that manmade light in theearly morning hours was not necessary.Carrington had witnessed the beginning of our biggest solar-storm in ourrecorded history, one created by the explosion of a white-light solar flare, amagnetic burst of energy on our friendly life-giver.
 
 The event he witnessed not only produced a surge of visible light but a superhuge cloud of charged particles and detached magnetic loops, “CMEs”, and thepower behind the disturbance hurled the cloud of protons and electronsdirectly towards Earth.CMEs reach velocities between 44,739 mph to 7.158 mil mph, with anaverage around 1.113 mil mph, whereas an average CME would take 83.4hours to bump into our magnetic shield. During the solar minimum period theSun ejects CMEs on average of one every 5
th
day, during the period of solarmaximum (which we’re in today) at least 3.5 per day – keep in mind that theseare averages as we cannot observe what is happening on the backside of theSun – in other words I realize the Sun is rotating, but CMEs do occur that we donot see or detect. The CMEs are balloon-shaped bursts of “solar wind” shooting out from theSun’s corona, expanding as they climb. The Solar Plasma is heated to tens of millions of degrees, as the electrons, protons, and heavy nuclei are acceleratedto near the speed of light. The super-heated electrons move along themagnetic field lines faster than the Solar Wind can flow, whereasrearrangement of the magnetic field within the CMEs “may” result in theformation of a “shock” that accelerates particles “ahead” of the CME loop.Estimates tell us that each CME can release up to 220 billion pounds of thismaterial, at the average speed noted above, in simple words CMEs arecurrently rated the biggest “explosions” in our solar system, approaching thepower of “one billion” hydrogen bombs.Between us and the Sun is what our scholars label the “interplanetarymedium”, which we often think as a “vacuum”, in reality it is a turbulent areadominated by the Solar Wind, which flows at velocities of 560,000 mph to2.236 million mph, naturally the composition of the Solar Wind such as itsdensity, make-up, and magnetic field strength vary with the ever changingconditions of the Sun – sort of like being married!Generally and average CME takes 3.5 days to effect our magnetic shield, inthis case it is primarily a strong “magnetic cloud” that will have a greatereffect on the magnetically created infrastructure (electricity) on our homeworld. The interplanetary space signature of a magnetic cloud being very
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