Potential for large solar flares and CME's may be with us again soon

I suggest NASA send a spaceship full of acne cream to the Sun?
It could be paid for by a global sunspot tax.

If you watch the brief but fascinating video linked in this article
[http://spaceweather.com/images2012/29mar12/ipad/c7.m4v]
There is a brief flash just as the X-radiation peaks and the plasma plume nears apex. The flash appears as “bright light” along 4 radiating lines from the Sun’s surface. Along each radiating line, a series of short bright line-segments appear, approximately at right angles to the radiating lines.
Anybody know what these are? Is it a polarization phenomenon?

Rosco says:
March 29, 2012 at 2:55 pm
We witness a strong CME.
Later we witness unusual warmth which returns to “normal” after a week or two. Australia gets some very high rainfall during your warmth – more than 4 inches in an hour on one day – weather phenomen now gone.
I have no idea but is this coincidence ?
According to one theory the CMEs lead to changes in clouds due to electroscavenging. This leads to a warm-up that lasts 2-3 weeks after the event. If this turns out to be true it would be another way the Sun impacts our climate.
http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/pdf/Electroscavenging2.pdf

in reply to:
“As solar activity got stronger during last 300 years the Earth’s magnetic ‘North’ pole got weaker
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC9.htm
but when both poles are taken into account since 1850’s the dipole lost more than 15% of its strength or 1%/decade.
Weaker dipole, weaker magnetosphere, further more the field falls of with power of 3 with distance i.e. the field at 2R(R=earth’s radius) away will only be 1/8 as strong as the field at 1R away.
On the plus side solar activity is falling off so we may possibly see some strengthening of the Earth’s field.”
&
to “Leif Svalgaard says:
March 29, 2012 at 3:38 pm
vukcevic says:
March 29, 2012 at 3:18 pm
solar activity is falling off so we may possibly see some strengthening of the Earth’s field.
For the so manyth time: these two phenomena have nothing to do with each other.”
You are both incorrect. The correct hypothesis must explain all of the observations. You started with a hypothesis and are defending a hypothesis.
My perspective concerning this issue is different from you as I spend a couple of years investigating quasars and a host of observational data related quasars and galaxy formation and properties. I then become interesting in paleoclimatology (in particular abrupt cyclic climate change which the researchers noted they could not explain) and then become very interested when I found a set of papers related to cyclic very large changes of the geomagnetic field. I then looked at the magnetic field of other planets in the solar system to see if there was any anomalous observations related to this same hypothesized mechanism. There was. (Check out the magnetic field of Uranus and Neptune. Think about what is written below.)
What I am stating is from published papers. I am basically just explaining what each of the authors stated. The only thing I have added is that there are four separated fields. Each author is a specialist in their field and is not familiar or interested in other fields. There is sufficient information and analysis from each field to pull together a complete hypothesis which is very significant in terms of explaining the anomalies in four separate specialties.
If I understand the mechanism, based on what has happened recently and based on past cyclic events, I would expect significant rapid cooling at high latitudes particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. (There are unexplained cycles in the paleoclimatic record of gradual significant climate change which are sometimes followed by an abrupt Heinrich abrupt climate change such as the Younger Dryas or the termination of the 22 past interglacial periods.)
If what is explained below is correct the planet will cool significantly (this is Dansgaard Oeschger cycle) and then sometime if solar magnetic cycle has occurred, there will be when the solar cycle restarts, a Heinrich event.
The recent rapid geomagnetic field (late twentieth century, the Southern Atlantic anomaly is now roughly 30% weaker than the geomagnetic field. The change in the field is accelerating. A planned European set of satellites will be launched this April to study the rapid reduction in the Southern Atlantic geomagnetic field). Both solar heliosphere changes and the geomagnetic field changes modulate the intensity of GCR that strikes the earth and amount of cloud forming ions.
There are cyclic extreme geomagnetic field changes in the geomagnetic field record. The cyclic geomagnetic field changes correlate with the climate changes. T
If the past cyclic geomagnetic field did occur, they occurred a physical reason. The sun if it is the cause is capable of a massive discharge. (As there is no geological phenomena that is capable of changing the geomagnetic field. A geomagnetic field change is capable of abruptly cooling the planet for a 1000 years.) Think of the amount of energy that is require to abruptly change the geomagnetic field.
Re-look at the solar observations.
The key to explain what is observed, is that the sun is a second generation star. The observational evidence and a decade of recent analysis does not support the classical black hole. Massive objects when the collapse due not form a classical black hole. (The point of what I am writing is the sun formed about a collapsed super nova.)
There is an immense magnetic field associated with quasars (See the paper by Stanley Robertson, Darryl Leiter) . A classical black hole cannot create a magnetic field and the magnetic field is stronger than accretion disk is capable of creating and is located in region of that is significantly closer the black hole that accretion disk can possible exist at.)
Classical black holes have no hair (they cannot contain a magnetic field). Very large objects when they collapse do not form a classical black hole. (See Robertson & Darryl Leiter’s paper for details.) A quantum mechanic phenomena arrests the collapsing object by forming a very, very, strong magnetic field that stops the collapse as the field creates electron/positron pair in the vacuum. The collapsed object is not stable and over time breaks apart, ejecting pieces of the super compressed collapsed object and dust. (There are massive dust clouds about quasars.) Evidence of this is Hawkins’ long term observation of quasars that found that they pulsate periodically at very long time scales (months and years) and the pulsation increase in amplitude. (All of the observed quasar pulsation increase in amplitude which indicates that there is a fundamental property and mechanism that is observed.)
What happens to massive objects when they collapse is a fundamental component in explaining a host of astronomical anomalies such as the rotational anomaly of spiral galaxies as well the very existence of spiral galaxies as compared to elliptical galaxies.
The orbital cycles of the planets influence the sun as the sun changes with time. There is a charge change. The planets take time to equalize to the change. There is a lag. There is a gradual change in solar charge with time as the cycle progresses which explains phenomena that is dependent on the length of the solar cycle. Follow the interruption of the solar magnetic cycle there are abrupt very large charge discharges. The interruption of the sun spot mechanism, stops the solar equalization mechanism which then allows the solar charge in balance to build up.
The Magnetospheric Eternally Collapsing Object (MECO) Model of Galactic Black Hole Candidates and Active Galactic Nuclei by Stanley Robertson, Darryl Leiter
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0602/0602453v1.pdf
The similarities of NS and GBHC properties, particularly in low and quiescent states, have been previously noted, [e.g. van der Klis 1994, Tanaka & Shibazaki 1996]. Jets and their synchrotron emissions in NS, GBHC and AGN also have obvious magnetic signatures. It is axiomatic that astrophysical objects of stellar mass and beyond have magnetic moments if they are not black holes, but an intrinsic magnetic moment is not a permissible attribute of a black hole. Yet in earlier work, [Robertson & Leiter 2002] we presented evidence for the existence of intrinsic magnetic moments of ∼ 1029−30 gauss m^3 in the galactic black hole candidates (GBHC) of low mass x-ray binary (LMXB).
Others have reported evidence for strong magnetic fields in GBHC. A field in excess of 10^8 G has been found at the base of the jets of GRS 1915+105 [Gliozzi, Bodo & Ghisellini 1999, Vadawale, Rao & Chakrabarti 2001]. A recent study of optical polarization of Cygnus X-1 in its low state [Gnedin et al. 2003] has found aslow GBHC spin and a magnetic field of ∼ 10^8 gauss at the location of its optical emission. These field strengths exceed disk plasma equipartition levels, but given the r^−3 dependence of field strength on magnetic moment, the implied magnetic moments are in very good agreement with those we report in Table 1.
Although there are widely studied models for generating magnetic fields in accretion disks, they can produce equipartition fields at best [Livio, Ogilvie & Pringle 1999], and perhaps at the expense of being too luminous [Bisnovatyi-Kogan & Lovelace 2000] in quiescence and in any case, too weak and comoving in accretion disks to drive jets. While tangled magnetic fields in accretion disks are very likely responsible for their large viscosity, [e.g. Hawley, Balbus & Winters 1999] the highly variable mass accretion rates in LMXB make it unlikely that disk dynamos could produce the stability of fields needed to account for either spectral state switches or quiescent spin-down luminosities. Both require magnetic fields co-rotating with the central object. Further, if disk dynamos produced the much larger apparent magnetic moments of GBHC, they should produce them also for the NS systems and cause profound qualitative spectral and timing differences from GBHC due to interactions with the intrinsic NS magnetic moments.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505518
Observations Supporting the Existence of an Intrinsic Magnetic Moment Inside the Central Compact Object Within the Quasar Q0957+561 by Rudolph Schild, Darryl Leiter, Stanley Robertson
This latter discovery was revealed in the following manner: a) First it was argued (Robertson and Leiter, 2002) that the spectral state switch and quiescent luminosities of low mass x-ray binaries, (LMXB) including GBHC, can be well explained by a magnetic propeller effect that requires an intrinsically magnetized central object. b) Second it was shown (Leiter and Robertson, 2003; Robertson and Leiter, 2003) that this result was consistent with the existence of a new class of gravitationally collapsing solutions of the Einstein field equations in General Relativity which describe highly red shifted, magnetospheric, Eternally Collapsing Objects (MECO) that do not have trapped surfaces leading to event horizons. These general relativistic MECO solutions were shown to emerge from the physical requirement that the structure and radiation transfer properties of the energy-momentum tensor on the right hand side of the Einstein field equations for a collapsing object must contain equipartition magnetic fields that generate a highly redshifted Eddington limited secular collapse process which satisfies the Strong Principle of Equivalence (SPE) requirement of time like world line completeness.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-3881/129/2/615/fulltext/
STRUCTURE FUNCTION ANALYSIS OF LONG-TERM QUASAR VARIABILITY
The cause of the long-term variability in quasars is still a matter of debate. Unlike the short-timescale variations (on the order of days), which are adequately described in terms of relativistic beaming effects (e.g., Bregman et al. 1990; Fan & Lin 2000; Vagnetti et al. 2003), the variations at much longer timescales (years to decades) are less well understood. Current scenarios under consideration range from source intrinsic variations due to active galactic nucleus (AGN) accretion disk instabilities (DIs; e.g., Shakura & Sunyaev 1976; Rees 1984; Siemiginowska & Elvis 1997; Kawaguchi et al. 1998; Starling et al. 2004) and possible bursts of supernovae events close to the nucleus (e.g., Terlevich et al. 1992; Cid Fernandes et al. 1996), to source extrinsic variations due to microlensing events along the line of sight to the quasar (e.g., Hawkins 1993, 2002; Alexander 1995; Yonehara et al. 1999; Zackrisson et al. 2003). See also the review article by Ulrich et al. (1997).
Determining which of the various proposed mechanisms actually dominates quasar variability is best done by studying it toward the longest possible time baselines. Depending on the mechanism, each has markedly different variability “power” at the longer timescales (e.g., Hawkins 2002). This means that if one has a quasar monitoring sample that is both large enough and covers a large enough time baseline, one could address these issues adequately. Unfortunately, given the nature of monitoring programs, this is not something that can be started overnight. The longest quasar light-curve monitoring programs are on the order of 20 yr (e.g., Hawkins 1996) and will take a long time before they are expanded significantly in time baseline.

John Day says:
March 29, 2012 at 4:56 pm
@rhs
> Out of curiosity, how often do Carrington type
> CME’s occur without Earth taking a direct hit?
Wikipedia says they occur on Earth every 500 years (deduced from nitrates deposits in ice cores
John Day notes the “literature” suggests once per 500 years a CME hits Earth. Unless a CME litters the orbital path of Eath for a 12 month period, the actual events must be very common. It could be that the nitrate data overestimates the level of a CME, but if a Carrington Event is the killer the namesake was, and it only happens for a few days and then goes away, then a Carrington Event per se must be very common for a 1 in 500 year record, say (for a 2 day “strike” time), one ever 18 months (two days in orbital period takes 500 years to be in the wrong place at the wrong time).
I’m betting the nitrates data recognizes something much, much less than a Carrington.
Here’s hoping.

No. It conforms with projection methods for the sun-spot count.
http://www.petermeadows.com/stonyhurst/blank100mm.pdf