Science Alert April 12, 2023 Solar observations detect energetic particles and hard X-rays but cannot reveal the generating mechanism because the particle acceleration happens at a scale smaller than the observation resolution. Thus, details of the cross-scale physics that explain the generation of energetic particles and hard X-rays remain a mystery. Researchers at Caltech set up a laboratory experiment toltage spike in braided magnetic flux ropes of a 2-eV plasma when the braid strand radius was choked down to be at the kinetic scale by either magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) kink or magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities. This sequence of hat simulates solar coronal […]
Tag Archives: Solar storms
Here Are the U.S. Regions Most Vulnerable to Solar Storms
IEEE Spectrum April 24, 2020 A once‐per‐century geoelectric hazard map is created for the U.S. high‐voltage power grid. A statistical extrapolation from 31 years of magnetic field measurements is made by identifying 84 geomagnetic storms. With these data, we estimate once‐per‐century geoelectric fields at the magnetotelluric survey sites and calculate the theoretical voltages within transmission lines in the U.S. power grid. Once‐per‐century geoelectric field strengths span more than 3 orders of magnitude from a minimum of 0.02 V/km at a site in Idaho to a maximum of 27.2 V/km at a site in Maine. A team of researchers in at […]