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Massive solar flare

Thanks for the heads up.

Tim-
 
There is only one solar flare that I am interested in right now. It's the star Betelgeuse. It has now begun to implode and will go supernova sometime between this year and 500 years from now. I am hoping sooner than later. When it does go, we will have a second sun in the sky for weeks that will be about the brightness of a full moon. Yes, we will take a direct hit from that supernova, but in order to be dangerous to mankind, it would have to be 25 light years or less from us. Betelgeuse is about 600 light years from us, so all we will get is a burst of harmless neutrinos, and a spectacular light show. Just to give you an idea of how large Betelgeuse is, the Hubble telescope was able to take a picture of it, not as a point of light, but actually resolved into a disk. If it were where the sun is right now, it's diameter would extend almost all the way out to the orbit of Jupiter. It is absolutely huge, and when it goes, we are going to see the kind of light show that happens only once in a millennium. This one will make the supernova that created the Crab Nebula seem like child's play. Before I die, I have one wish... I want to see this. :)
 
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There is only one solar flare that I am interested in right now. It's the star Betelgeuse. It has now begun to implode and will go supernova sometime between this year and 500 years from now. I am hoping sooner than later. When it does go, we will have a second sun in the sky for weeks that will be about the brightness of a full moon. Yes, we will take a direct hit from that supernova, but in order to be dangerous to mankind, it would have to be 25 light years or less from us. Betelgeuse is about 600 light years from us, so all we will get is a burst of harmless neutrinos, and a spectacular light show. Just to give you an idea of how large Betelgeuse is, the Hubble telescope was able to take a picture of it, not as a point of light, but actually resolved into a disk. If it were where the sun is right now, it's diameter would extend almost all the way out to the orbit of Jupiter. It is absolutely huge, and when it goes, we are going to see the kind of light show that happens only once in a millennium. This one will make the supernova that created the Crab Nebula seem like child's play. Before I die, I have one wish... I want to see this. :)

Man I hope this happens. The universe is awesome, and I mean the literal definition: it inspires awe. The mind struggles with the attempt to grasp the sheer magnitude of such an event. It is like a bacteria trying to think about a nuclear bomb, we just don't exist on that scale.
 
I never really got the tin foil thing. When that ancient TV with the rabbit ears wasn't getting a channel properly, we'd put tinfoil on to improve the signal...

Tin foil hats are a government conspiracy to get you to amplify their signals.

I traced the origins of the Tin Foil Hat back to a story called “The Tissue-Culture King” by Julian Huxley which was published in the 1920s. The story itself sucks, it’s about a scientific experiment gone bad, an unremarkable story except for this:

The reader will perhaps ask how we ourselves expected to escape from the clutches of the superconsciousness we had created. Well, we had discovered that metal was relatively impervious to the telepathic effect, and had prepared for ourselves a sort of tin pulpit, behind which we could stand while conducting experiments. This, combined with caps of metal foil, enormously reduced the effects on ourselves. We had not informed Bugala of this property of metal…..

A Brief History Of The Tin Foil Hat

FWIW??? :)
 
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