Did you know that there are terminator events in the life of our sun that can spawn a solar
tsunami – colossal and super-fast waves of pure burning plasma making the magnetic
poles of the sun go bonkers and literally flip?
Sounds scary!
So scary in fact, I couldn’t resist learning more about it so I could share my research
with you.
Let’s climb this mountain of slightly disturbing facts from the ground up.
Starting with the simplest question of all: What is our sun?
And what is any star for that matter?
Don’t rush to answer, because the following one may surprise you: the sun is literally
a ball of countless nuclear explosions.
See for yourself: one of the two main components of the sun is a gas called hydrogen.
This one element constitutes around 75% of all the mass in the Universe, and fills the
core of the Sun.
It’s also the most convenient element for nuclear fusion.
Say that with me: fusion.
Immense pressure and heat around 27 million degrees, produced by the sun’s gravitational
force, pushes atoms of hydrogen to fuse into each other and form a new atom – an atom
of helium.
This is why it’s called nuclear fusion; you know.
Every second, the sun transforms 620 million tons of hydrogen into helium.
Whew that could fill a lot of balloons!
This process releases an amount of energy roughly equal to the explosion of 92 billion
megatons of TNT.
That’s more than enough to blast an earth-sized planet away - nothing to joke about, really!
And remember that this is all in just one second.
The whole process takes place in only the heaviest, hottest, and most pressurized part
of the sun – its core.
Oddly enough, this part takes the least amount of space compared to other layers of our Sun’s
interior – the core is just a fifth of the whole diameter of the sun.
While the sun is 109 times wider than the Earth, its core is only about 22 times larger
than our planet.
All the mass and energy in the core of the sun is contained by its own gravitational
force, but none of the hydrogen and helium can stay in their gas form in such conditions.
All the sun’s contents are actually plasma.
This is the fourth state of matter; and believe me, you don’t only see it in your plasma
TV and sci-fi movies.
Fire and electric discharges, like lightning, are plasma too.
To be perfectly fair, 99.9% of all matter in the Universe is plasma, and only a tiny
fraction of it consists of a solid tangible material.
Now you can make an educated guess about what the solar tsunami wave could possibly be.
It’s a huge wave of plasma that shoots itself from the surface of the sun.
Imagine a wall of blazing light that’s eight times higher than the diameter of the Earth
itself!
And then imagine it moving at 560,000 mph.
Ever saw how fast lightning is?
Well, this monstrous wave is 2.5 times faster than that.
The first time astronomers discovered a solar tsunami, in 1997, they couldn’t believe
that their data was correct.
They thought what they saw was just a sudden shadow, or a malfunction of the tech, but
it was a wave.
In 2009, using NASA’s observatory, called STEREO, astronomers were able to finally confirm
it.
They even saw the wave breaking on sunspots, unable to proceed further in some parts.
But the cause of these tsunamis was still a mystery for a long time.
Only recently, Scott McIntosh led a group of scientists in a study that shed light on
these events.
Yes, that pun was intentional.
They concluded that solar tsunamis are an integral part of solar cycles.
Each of the solar cycles is a period equal to about 11 years, and by the end of each
cycle, the sun’s magnetic poles switch ends.
It’s also called a sunspot cycle, since the sun changes its sunspot activity during
this time as well.
There’s more to every celestial object than what we can detect with our human eyes.
There are invisible things like the Earth’s atmosphere, or heliosphere, in the case of
the sun.
There are vast areas of gravitational pull around each planet or star; and of course,
there are magnetic fields.
The sun and the Earth, like every other big body in space, can be imagined as magnets.
As you probably know, every magnet has two oppositely charged sides – positive and
negative.
Here on the Bright Side, we always stay positive.
But celestial bodies eventually change these sides.
The difference between the sun and the Earth is that the sun changes its polarities every
11 years, while the sturdy structure of the Earth’s core allows it to retain its polarities
for about a million years.
We live in a time of the greatest opportunities for researchers.
The midpoint of the solar cycle passed by in April of 2014.
It was called the “solar maximum”: the point in which the sunspot activity of our
sun was at its peak.
Now we’re preparing for the end of the current solar cycle, and the beginning of a new one,
which will be marked by the point in which the sun becomes less active and produces less
sunspots – or the “solar minimum”.
To be fair, one pole of the sun has already changed its charge.
Basically, at the end of a solar cycle, the sun has two positive poles.
Don’t panic!
The other pole will change its polarity soon; but in the meantime, the sun is still perfectly
balanced by the lesser points of the solar magnetic field.
With events like that, it’s no wonder a lot of fearmongering prophecies appear all
around the world.
And it doesn’t help when scientists decide to call something related to our solar cycle
“the terminator”!
We’ve lived through lots of solar cycles before with absolutely no problems.
Being every 11 years, it’s pretty probable that you’ve seen at least one of them, and
are certainly going to witness the upcoming one.
Speaking of terminator events – this is just the name for the movement of the solar
magnetic field.
When it moves through the sun, it builds a pool of charged plasma behind it, and then,
when two such fields collide with each other – their pools literally explode and release
all their energy by forming a solar tsunami.
Terminator events were found via careful examination of data that’s been collected in the last
140 years.
The most interesting things about them were extreme ultra-violet outbursts; they mark
the process of a terminator event.
So this word doesn’t mean anything really scary; solar tsunamis happen regularly, and
they’re relatively harmless to us.
This brings us to the next question: what’s the big deal with all this panic about solar
cycles?
The thing is, the Earth is naturally protected from hazardous cosmic radiation by its own
magnetic field, and by the magnetic field of our sun, which reaches far beyond our planet.
All kinds of ominous prophecies suggest that the changing of the sun’s poles may cause
a breach in this protective field.
Incoming radiation might destroy all of humanity’s technology, and effectively push people back
to the stone-age.
Meh.
Trust me, this isn’t going to happen.
Even when you word it like that, you can tell something is wrong with this theory.
The magnetic field of the sun sure will become a little unstable, but only for a very brief
amount of time.
You won’t notice a thing!
And what’s better, we have proof of that: nothing catastrophic happened 11 years ago.
But still, there’s one thing we can’t know for sure.
As I mentioned before, it’s not only the sun that can switch its magnetic poles, but
the Earth too.
The last time that happened was over 780,000 years ago, and we can barely predict what
will happen the next time.
The only thing we know for sure is that 780,000 years ago it didn’t seem to cause much trouble
for life on Earth.
But our existence is a lot more complicated now.
We need navigation, our orbital satellites, and electricity – all of which could be
damaged if the magnetic field of the Earth becomes weaker.
There are already zones in which the magnetic field becomes weaker at an alarming rate,
and researchers are doing their best to predict what happens next.
What do you think would happen if we lost the technology we use daily?
Let me know in the comments!
Either way, the magnetic field will stabilize soon, and it won’t bring a real catastrophe
like some people say – just a challenge for humanity’s knowledge about the planet
we live on.
With more scientific breakthroughs like ones I told you about today, I think it’s safe
to say that our future is in the right hands.
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