How can we get any solar flare warning?
Question by CoffeeGeek: How can we get any solar flare warning?
If a solar flare travels at the speed of light, how can NASA (or anybody else) provide warning of them? It would seem that by the time their equipment detected the flare, its already here.
It seems comparable to having a “bullet warning system” that alerts you when you’ve been shot.
What am I missing?
Best answer:
Answer by Daryl S
You are confusing the “light” from the sun with a “solar flare”. LIGHT from the sun travels at the speed of light (naturally). A solar flare takes a little longer to get here (about 1 million mph).
Give your answer to this question below!
It doesn’t travel at the speed of light. A solar flare ejects a stream of charged particles which take about 2-3 days to get here.
Solar flares don’t travel at light speed.
Nor do the geomagnetic stoms that are caused by CMEs.
There are two different things involved. The solar flare itself is visible on the Sun and its light travels to us at the speed of light, taking 8 minutes to get here. Some solar flares, like the one yesterday, trigger a Coronal Mass Ejection which travels on the solar wind at a much slower speed, so takes a day or two to reach us. Thus we saw the flare yesterday morning, but the CME won’t reach us until some time tonight or tomorrow.
So a better analogy is, I fire a gun at you. You will see the muzzle flash long before the bullet reaches you. If you’re in a TV show, you’ll even have time to duck.
Lol, I was going to type a response but GeoFF did that well enough
However for a long journey to such far away places as Mars, there would be too little fuel to change course to avoid solar flares and radiation would destroy and biological matter inside the probe.
At the same time, for a solar flare to destroy all electrical processes on Earth or flip the geopoles of the Earth, it would have to be thousands of time stronger then the typical solar flare. Think of it like this: Instead of the usual firecracker, the sun(A childish boy in this anology), well intead of cracking a small firecracker or a little firework, he would have to drop several atomic bombs to match the strength of such a solar flare reletive to the average solar flare.
Many of the satellites observing the Sun 24/7/365 ARE CLOSER TO THE SUN than the Earth is.
CME’s and solar flares propogate much more slowly than the speed of light coming from those solar flares and CME’s does.
The solar flare is not a light flare, it is a blast of high energy particles from the Sun. They travel at a lot less than the speed of light. So, we see the light, and that tells us that something is on its way and we can prepare for the arrival of the flare itself.