Storms from the Sun The Emerging Science of Space Weather (2002) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2. Sun-Eating Dragons, Hairy Stars, and Bridges to Heaven
2. Sun-Eating Dragons, Hairy Stars, and Bridges to Heaven
Pages 31-50
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From page 31... ...
Alienatecl by the crew the local tribes cut off the foot! supplies.
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From page 32... ...
Columbus had no direct line to a deity, of course, but he did have a keen insight into the human mind and a decent set of reference materials. He likely had information on the Saros, the ancient mathematical formula devised by the Babylonians to predict the cycles of solar and lunar eclipses.
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From page 33... ...
Solar eclipses happen when the new Moon passes clirectly between the Sun ant! Earth, leaving part of the Earth in the Moon's shaclow.i Total eclipses clo not take place every time there is a new Moon because of the tilt ant!
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From page 34... ...
In the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, the Gospel writer fohn writes: "Then I watched as he broke open the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; the Sun turned as black as dark sackcloth and the whole Moon became like blood." Like Amos, fohn was writing symbolically, but he had tapped into an existing cultural belief that eclipses and earthquakes are somehow linked. Years before, while writing about the Peloponnesian War, the Greek historian Thucydides noted that "earthquakes and eclipses of the Sun came to pass more frequently than had been remembered in former times." In another passage he wrote: "There was an eclipse of the Sun at the time of a new Moon, and in the early part of the same month an earthquake." Another Greek writer, Phiegon, reported that "in the fourth year of the two hundred second Olympiad, there was an eclipse of the Sun which was greater than any known before, and in the sixth hour of the day it became night; so that stars appeared in the heaven; and a great earthquake that broke out in Bithynia destroyed the greatest part of Nicaea." More than a thousand years later, John Milton wrote in the epic Paradise Lost:
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From page 35... ...
of the Sun (see Figure 4~. When compared with the density of the gas and the intensity of the light on the Sun's visible surface, or photosphere, the hot ionized gas (or plasma)
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From page 36... ...
With the brilliant disk of the Sun blocked, the faint light of the corona reveals streamers of solar wind blowing out into space. This eclipse was photographed in 1991 from atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
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From page 37... ...
Second Civil War Comets." The most famous ant! infamous of all comets, of course, is Halley's.
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some people panickocI. Years earlier scientists had detected cyanogen, a poisonous gas, in the tail of a comet.
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From page 39... ...
But these crusty ice balls clo reveal the signature of at least one natural phenomenon that affects life in the solar system: the solar wincl. The solar wind is a stream of electrically charged particlesessentially, hydrogen gas that is heated to a point where it is broken into its constituent protons ant!
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From page 40... ...
But for most of history, humans have seen a lot more in the heavens that just a brilliant, ghostly light show. Aristotle, writing in his Meteorologica, macle one of the first truly scientific accounts of the aurora borealis.
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From page 41... ...
Ancient folklore from China and Europe describe auroras, with their twisting, snake-like shapes, as great dragons or serpents in the skies. One theory holds that the dragon faced down by Britain's patron Saint George was in fact the aurora swirling in the sky over Scotland.
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From page 42... ...
the first description to invoke the name "northern lights" an anonymous Norwegian author took a more sober and scientific approach. The author of the Kongespeilet "The King's Mirror" wrote in 1230 that: "These northern lights have this peculiar nature, that the darker the night is, the brighter they seem, and they always appear at night but never by clay, most frequently in the densest darkness ant!
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From page 43... ...
Namecl for the Roman goddess of Lawn, auroras occur when fastmoving particles trapped in Earth's magnetic fielcl come crashing clown from space into the gases of Earth's upper atmosphere. Those electrically charged particles (electrons and protons)
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From page 44... ...
southern hemispheres, confirming that the auroral ovals mimic each other. During more intense periods of space weather (when a coronal mass ejection or an intense flare alights from the Sun)
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The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras may have observer! a spot in 467 B.C.E., ant!
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From page 46... ...
the existence of sunspots: Tohannes Fabricius in HoliancI, Thomas Harriot in EnglancI, Galileo Galilei in Italy, ant! the Jesuit mathematician Christopher Scheiner in Germany.
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the Sun clay by clay in search of the mysterious planet Vulcan, which many sky watchers believer! to be the closest planet to the Sun, inside the orbit of Mercury.
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And by comparing 20 years of magnetic field data with Schwabe's sunspot data, English scientist and general Edward Sabine announced in 1852 that he had found a pattern in the occurrence of magnetic storms that paralleled the rise and fall of sunspots. Schwabe had been looking at the Sun to discover a planet inside the orbit of Mercury.
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From page 49... ...
Eclipses, comets, auroras, and sunspots are indeed won- (g drous portents and signs, and the heavens really do affect life on Earth. As signals of space weather, these phenomena affect how we live in a modern technological civilization, as scientists learned firsthand in 1859.
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