<story><title>An eruption from the Sun that happened today</title><url>http://youtu.be/Hyi4hjG6kDM</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Very cool. Its amazing what we don&apos;t know about the star sitting just 8 light minutes away from us.&lt;p&gt;For jnorthrop generally these events are effectively deflected by the Earth&apos;s magnetosphere, however we don&apos;t know what we don&apos;t know. Its hard to estimate whether or not any one of the extinction events this planet has experienced over the past was caused by solar activity.&lt;p&gt;I would hope it would add impetutus to efforts to surviving large changes in the Earth&apos;s envioronment by creating completely controlled environments (ideally across several planetary bodies) but I have low expectations that it will.&lt;p&gt;One of the science stories I&apos;ve been following for a while has been the growing body of evidence that a magnetic pole reversal [1] is becoming more likely. (Note there was a hoax around it changing instantly in 2012 which has been pretty thoroughly debunked). One thing that is pretty well understood is that during reversals the magnetosphere is greatly reduced [2] which suggests that the simulataneous occurence of a CME and a reversal of the poles resulting in a reduced magnetosphere would be something to write home about.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/29dec_magneticfield.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/29dec_magnet...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.off-ladhyx.polytechnique.fr/people/willis/papers/Nature425.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.off-ladhyx.polytechnique.fr/people/willis/papers/...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>An eruption from the Sun that happened today</title><url>http://youtu.be/Hyi4hjG6kDM</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skrebbel</author><text>Damn, I read &quot;One of the coolest eruptions from Sun you&apos;ll ever see. This happened today.&quot;&lt;p&gt;I was like finally, closures in java!</text></comment>