Dig out those flares for the weekend!

Uh uh uh uh stayin' alive stayin' alive

Sunspot 1402 exploded at 1430 UTC 19/1/2012. UTC is what the world calls GMT because they don't like the English. UTC is very nearly almost within a second of GMT (See Greenwich, where time was invented). Basically, if you'll pardon the language for the sake of the imagery, just this once, our sun farted last Thursday, a couple of hours before tea time and Blue Peter.

It did so during a long-duration event and it did so directly towards our little blue planet.

This time it sort of almost missed. The resultant CME or "Coronal Mass Ejection" (a plasma cloud to you and me), with all of its attendant protons, photons, piglets and re-runs of Saturday Night Fever songs, will strike a glancing blow at the North Pole. If you live in England this will take place over Saturday night and Sunday, the 21st and 22nd of January 2012CE. CE is what we non-theists call AD: CE = AD and BCE = BC (Current Era and Before Current Era).

What does this mean? Well, for a start, Father Christmas is toast. By Monday morning there will be a charcoal outline of a jolly fat chap and six thousand elves on the snow. The North Pole Police don't use white tape to outline bodies, for obvious reasons (if the reasons aren't immediately obvious then I don't think that I can help you). Vases and small lap-dogs in the Home Counties may tremble. Pictures hung on walls by amateurs may slip to a jaunty angle. Your short-wave radio may suffer increased static. Ladies may experience a mild blue St. Emo's static-discharge glow around the the wires of their corsets (this is like a St Elmo's fire but more depressing).

Sat-navs will be ever so slightly less reliable than usual and may feature the occasional one where a zero ought to be, as the satellites adjust their parasols and rub in more Max Factor Maximum Factor. This probably translates to at least one non-BMW driver being directed over a cliff while he searches for Piddling on the Wold or some other quaint but obscure village. It will be lost in the statistics.

Sheep may form up in patterns like iron filings and all face North. While disconcerting this is not life-threatening.

[My Aged Aunt's electric armchair may also malfunction and take her crashing through her front door and over the roof of the community centre, all the while folding and refolding and raising and lowering her be-slippered legs. This has nothing to do with the solar flare, it's just that I've had an idea and the parts have arrived in the post this morning from Radio Shack.]

This lovely Tzar-Trekky style website here has lots of detail and photographs. This is an extremely minor solar event, only involving thousands of millions of tonnes of nuclear matter and our nice magnetic field will (I hope!) protect us as usual. Try to forget that the Earth's magnetic field is due to disappear for a while soon while it flips (due any time around now, plus or minus 100,000 years, disappearance likely to be only for a momentary 1,000 years while it turns over).

We're safe, we're OK, this time, again. Electronics might just blip slightly more than usual, it's minor.

Am I alone in being frightened by the Sun? Not the newspaper, that scares everyone, I mean "our" star, the big bright thing in the sky? I am solar powered - depressed as hell when it hides behind clouds for too long but like a scared rabbit when it shines so brightly that it feels hot on my skin. I keep thinking that even at 150,000,000 kilometres distant it is making me uncomfortable - and I have nowhere to run. If I waddled as far and as fast as I possibly could then at most I could move the sun to 150,012,750 kilometres, hardly worth the change! I love the shade! Seriously, a hot blazing sun scares me. It makes me feel like a flea on an ant in comparison, and that's being generous to myself.

We are truly, truly peculiar creatures. We're two metres tall, scurrying about on a ball of mud in a soup of gas maybe twenty thousand metres deep, we have a temperature range with a comfort zone of maybe twenty degrees CelsiHeits with much more or much less being fatal (and making it difficult for the strawberries). We need watering every few days and feeding every few weeks, absolute minimum. The ball of mud and rock that we're clinging to is spinning us at up to 24,000 miles a day as it itself spins around a ball of nuclear fire while the whole arrangement spins in a galaxy that is itself moving at incredible speeds through space and time that we don't understand. We do this while our little star has gastric problems and shoots plasma at us. And yet we get awfully upset when the Digibox fails to record the last three minutes of an episode of Sherlock or Top of the Pops... or when arguing over how many words the Eskimos have for snow.

NASA Image

It's all a question of priorities I suppose and whether you enjoy being flailed by whips of plasma.