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Thrilled scientists see `solar belch' from start to end
by Seattle Times news services
Jan. 23, 1997
WASHINGTON - A vast magnetic cloud erupted from the sun and collided head-on with Earth at a million miles an hour earlier this month, delivering a "one-two punch" to Earth's magnetic field and, some scientists say, possibly causing the catastrophic failure of a $200 million AT&T communications satellite.
This powerful solar belch might have passed largely unnoticed but for a new international fleet of satellites now in position to study "space weather."
The latest burst was detected Jan. 6 by the joint NASA-European Space Agency satellite SOHO, scientists said at a briefing yesterday.  As solar storms go, the event wasn't unusual. The sun is now in the quiet middle of its 11-year cycle, and by the 2000-2002 period there will be plenty more storms like it.
"What it is, is the first time that one of these events has been captured sort of cradle to grave," said NASA science spokesman Stephen Maran.  The bubble that hit Earth on Jan. 10 was about 30 million miles in diameter and, traveling at 280 miles a second, took more than a day to pass.
Solar experts at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., described the event as a "coronal mass ejection." That's a magnetic phenomenon in which hydrogen and helium on the sun, for reasons not well understood, are suddenly thrown into space as a huge bubble of hot gas and atomic particles, chiefly protons and electrons.  The material flies away from the sun in an expanding, dome-shaped cloud.
When it reaches a planet with a magnetic field, such as Earth, a portion of the cloud's electrically charged particles gets swept into that magnetic field, charging it with vast amounts of electrical and magnetic energy.  If they are large enough, the surges can knock out satellites and induce electrical currents in oil pipelines, telephone and electric power lines. A large solar storm in March 1989 caused a nine-hour outage in Quebec.

And you thought the belches on my Submissions Pages were big!  It is also interesting to note that this solar belch occured about the same time that President Clinton was first getting blown by Monica.  Hmmm...

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