David M. Rountree  

By Robert Roy Britt
Editorial Director
posted: 07 January 2009
09:03 am ET
 

A new study from the National Academy of Sciences outlines grim possibilities on Earth for a worst-case scenario solar storm.

Damage to power grids and other communications systems could be catastrophic, the scientists conclude, with effects leading to a potential loss of governmental control of the situation.

The prediction is based in part on major solar storm in 1859 caused telegraph wires to short out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires. It was perhaps the worst in the past 200 years, according to the new study, and with the advent of modern power grids and satellites, much more is at risk.

"A contemporary repetition of the [1859] event would cause significantly more extensive (and possibly catastrophic) social and economic disruptions," the researchers conclude.

'Command and control might be lost'

When the sun is in the active phase of its 11-year cycle, it can unleash powerful magnetic storms that disable satellites, threaten astronaut safety, and even disrupt communication systems on Earth. The worst storms can knock out power grids by inducing currents that melt transformers.

Modern power grids are so interconnected that a big space storm -- the type expected to occur about once a century -- could cause a cascade of failures that would sweep across the United States, cutting power to 130 million people or more in this country alone, the new report concludes.

Such widespread power outages, though expected to be a rare possibility, would affect other vital systems.

"Impacts would be felt on interdependent infrastructures with, for example, potable water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; immediate or eventual loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, transportation, fuel resupply and so on," the report states.

Outages could take months to fix, the researchers say. Banks might close, and trade with other countries might halt.

"Emergency services would be strained, and command and control might be lost," write the researchers, led by Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

"Whether it is terrestrial catastrophes or extreme space weather incidents, the results can be devastating to modern societies that depend in a myriad of ways on advanced technological systems," Baker said in a statement released with the report.

Stormy past

Solar storms have had significant effects in modern time:

In 1989, the sun unleashed a tempest that knocked out power to all of Quebec, Canada.
A remarkable 2003 rampage included 10 major solar flares over a two-week period, knocking out two Earth-orbiting satellites and crippling an instrument aboard a Mars orbiter.
"Obviously, the sun is Earth's life blood," said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics division at NASA. "To mitigate possible public safety issues, it is vital that we better understand extreme space weather events caused by the sun's activity."

"Space weather can produce solar storm electromagnetic fields that induce extreme currents in wires, disrupting power lines, causing wide-spread blackouts and affecting communication cables that support the Internet," the report states. "Severe space weather also produces solar energetic particles and the dislocation of the Earth's radiation belts, which can damage satellites used for commercial communications, global positioning and weather forecasting."

Rush to prepare

The race is on for better forecasting abilities, as the next peak in solar activity is expected to come around 2012. While the sun is in a lull now, activity can flare up at any moment, and severe space weather -- how severe, nobody knows -- will ramp up a year or two before the peak.

Some scientists expect the next peak to bring more severe events than other recent peaks.

"A catastrophic failure of commercial and government infrastructure in space and on the ground can be mitigated through raising public awareness, improving vulnerable infrastructure and developing advanced forecasting capabilities," the report states. "Without preventive actions or plans, the trend of increased dependency on modern space-weather sensitive assets could make society more vulnerable in the future."

The report was commissioned and funded by NASA. Experts from around the world in industry, government and academia participated. It was released this week.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090107-space-weather-storms.html

By Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer
posted: 05 January 2009
05:39 pm ET
 

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Scientists have dramatically revised the mass of the Milky Way, saying our home galaxy is half again as heavy as previously thought.

The Milky Way is now on par with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy in terms of heft. The Milky Way spins a lot faster than was thought, too.

Astronomers arrived at the new mass by using the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope to make detailed images of the galaxy's structure, measuring distances and motions of different areas of the Milky Way.

These high-precision measurements, presented here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, indicate that the galaxy's speed at the position of our solar system (at a distance of 28,000 light-years from the galactic center) is about 600,000 mph (970,000 kph) to 100,000 mph (160,000 kph) faster than previously thought.

That increase in speed increases the Milky Way's mass by 50 percent, said team member Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and that added heft makes our galaxy a much more serious contender against Andromeda.

"No longer will we think of the Milky Way as the little sister of the Andromeda Galaxy in our Local Group family," Reid said.

The new mass for the Milky Way is 3 trillion solar masses, Reid said, and that larger mass, in turn, means that the Milky Way exerts a greater gravitational pull that increases the likelihood of collisions with Andromeda or other smaller nearby galaxies.

The team used the VLBA, a system of 10 radio-telescope antennas stretching from Hawaii to New England and the Caribbean, to observe regions of prolific star formation across the Milky Way. Gas molecules strengthen the naturally-occurring radio emissions in portions of these regions, in the same way that lasers strengthen light beams.

The astronomers tracked these areas, called cosmic masers, observing them when the Earth was at opposite sides of its orbit around the sun. The apparent shift of the light can be measured against the background of more distant objects to triangulate their positions and movements.

The observations are also shedding light on the Milky Way's spiral structure, because cosmic masers "define the spiral arms of the Galaxy," Reid explained.

The measurements showed that "most star-forming regions do not follow a circular path as they orbit the galaxy; instead we find them moving more slowly than other regions and on elliptical, not circular, orbits," Reid said.

The elliptical orbits are the result of what are called spiral density wave shocks, which can take gas in a circular orbit, compress it to form stars and cause it to go into a new, elliptical orbit, reinforcing the galaxy's spiral structure.

The VLBA observations also yielded other surprises about the spiral structure.

"These measurements indicated that our galaxy probably has four, not two, spiral arms of gas and dust that are forming stars," Reid said.

Recent surveys by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that older stars are found mostly in just two spiral arms. Why they don't form in the other arms is a question astronomers say will require more measurements and observations.

In separate news today, NASA released a striking new image that is the sharpest infrared view ever taken of the Milky Way's core. It reveals a new population of massive stars and new details about complex structures in the hot gas around the galactic center.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090105-aas-milky-way-mass.html

By Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer - Space.com
posted: 06 January 2009
05:31 pm ET
 

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Astronomers may have solved a cosmic chicken-and-the-egg problem: Which came first — galaxies or the supermassive black holes in their cores?

For several years now, researchers have known that galaxies and black holes must have co-evolved, with budding galaxies feeding material to a growing black hole while the immense gravity of the black hole generated in its vicinity tremendous radiation that in turn powered star formation. But the scientists hadn't pegged the starting point.

"It looks like black holes came first. The evidence is piling up," said Chris Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico. Carilli presented his team's findings here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Previous studies of nearby galaxies revealed an intriguing link between the masses of the black holes at their centers and the mass of the central "bulge" (a mass of tightly packed stars and gas) in the galaxies: The black hole's mass is always about one one-thousandth the mass of the surrounding bulge.

The ratio is the same for galaxies of all ages and sizes, whether the central black hole is a few million or many billions of times the mass of our sun.

"This constant ratio indicates that the black hole and the bulge affect each others' growth in some sort of interactive relationship," said study team member Dominik Riechers of Caltech. "The big question has been whether one grows before the other or if they grow together, maintaining their mass ratio throughout the entire process."

To help answer this question, Carilli, Riechers and the rest of their team used the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico and the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in France to peer back to near the beginning of the universe, thought to be 13.7 billion years ago, when the first galaxies were forming.

"We finally have been able to measure black-hole and bulge masses in several galaxies seen as they were in the first billion years after the Big Bang, and the evidence suggests that the constant ratio seen nearby may not hold in the early universe," said study team member Fabian Walter of the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany. "The black holes in these young galaxies are much more massive compared to the bulges than those seen in the nearby universe."

The upshot: "The implication is that the black holes started growing first," Walter said.

The next piece to place in the puzzle will be to figure out exactly how black holes and central bulges affect each others' growth and how the bulges eventually race past the black holes to become more massive.

"We don't know what mechanism is at work here, and why, at some point in the process, the 'standard' ratio between the masses is established," Riechers said.

New telescopes currently in the works, including the Expanded Very Large Array and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, will be key tools in solving this mystery, Carilli said.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090106-aas-black-holes-galaxies.html

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