The Week in Space and Physics: Solar Storms
On big solar storms, Dyson Spheres, Euclid's early images and the flights of Starliner and Starship
Sorry for the lack of posts recently! The last month was difficult for me on a personal level, and as such I have found it hard to focus on writing. I expect to get back to a normal posting schedule again over the coming weeks. For those of you who are paying subscribers, I have configured Substack to give you free month in order to make up for my unexpected absence.
As I covered in January, 2024 promises to be a year of exceptional solar activity. So far that prediction has borne out. In April a total solar eclipse wowed millions of observers across North America. In May, thanks to an outburst of unusually complex sunspots, dramatic aurora lit up the night skies across much of our planet.
Observers first spotted the cluster of sunspots in early May, when the Sun’s rotation brought them into view. Soon after they saw a series of strong flares bursting out of the cluster, and then, between May 7th and May 10th, they watched as at least seven coronal mass ejections took place.
In each of those mass ejections a blob of solar plasma was flung into space. As they travelled across the inner solar system - a journey that took several days - they grouped into waves. On May 10th, according to NASA, they began striking the Earth, together forming the most powerful solar storm to hit the Earth in at least two decades.
Most visible for us on Earth were the auroras that appeared in the night sky. That display was caused by particles moving through our planet’s magnetic field. But the surge of solar plasma also disrupted satellites, threatened power grids and forced astronauts to avoid dangerous radiation.
Even stronger flares are hinted at in tree ring records. The presence of certain atoms in those rings suggests extreme flares hit the planet in 993 and 774 AD; though historical records of those events, and the aurora they must have produced, are sketchy. Some studies do, however, show that other sunlike stars are capable of massive “superflares”, and that those ancient events might be signs that our Sun can occasionally produce something similar.
It is unlikely that anything that intense will come our way this year. But the Sun is now reaching the peak of its eleven year long cycle in activity. More flares - and more aurora - are a distinct possibility over the coming months. Indeed, the current burst of activity may not be over just yet. The responsible cluster of sunspots rotated away from view a week ago. It is now - according to recent observations - of the cusp of rotating back towards us.
Hunting for Dyson Spheres
For a long time, the search for alien life was all about listening. Aliens might broadcast their presence, some thought, and if we listened hard enough we might be able to hear the messages they were sending. And so, for several decades, we scanned the skies for radio signals, hoping to pick up a transmission from ET.
By and large the search, with a few possible exceptions, came up empty handed. There are reasons for this: the galaxy is big, radio signals could come from any direction at any time, and be sent on almost any frequency. To find one we’d need to be lucky, and - anyway - aliens may simply have decided not to transmit anything at all.
What if, some are now suggesting, we try looking instead of listening? Thanks to modern telescopes and computing technology, we now have vast amounts of data about the stars in our galaxy. The Gaia observatory, for example, has charted the positions and brightnesses of billions of stars. WISE, a telescope designed to hunt for asteroids, has collected millions of images of the night sky over the past fifteen years.
Hidden in all that data, alien hunters think, might be traces of alien technology. One possibility is the presence of a Dyson Sphere, an idea first explored by the physicist Freeman Dyson in the 1960s. Advanced civilizations, he pointed out, would have vast energy needs. They might try to meet those needs by building shells of solar panels around their stars.
If so, we should be able to find them. Dyson calculated that such spheres should appear faint in visible light, but bright in infrared as a consequence of how they use and dump energy. And that is exactly the kind of feature we can detect in modern astronomical surveys.
For the past few years, a team at Uppsala University in Sweden has been scouring the available data for signs of these objects. In a paper released earlier this month they present their findings, and list seven stars, out of five million studied, which they think fit the description. Each is a star smaller and dimmer than our Sun, and each showed signs of emitting more infrared light than could otherwise be explained.
Admittedly this could be because of unseen dust clouds around those stars, and not because of arrays of solar panels. But this survey at least identifies some interesting candidates, and will give future alien hunters somewhere to focus their attention, and, perhaps, their ears.
What Euclid Saw
The Euclid space telescope, launched last July, is dedicated to the search for dark matter and dark energy. Over the next few years the observatory will map out the positions of millions of galaxies, thus providing data that scientists will use to trace the presence of those mysterious and ghostly forces.
This task will consume the majority of the observatory’s time. To mark the telescope’s entry into service, however, and to highlight its capabilities, the European Space Agency - who operate Euclid - decided to dedicate some of its hours to other things. It has, as a result, spent time gazing into globular clouds, galactic clusters and the nebula of Orion.
The resulting data - released on May 23rd - has little to do with Euclid’s primary mission. They do, however, offer crystal sharp views of some enticing objects. Among the images it returned were some eleven million objects - stars, planets and galaxies - many of which had never been seen before.
That includes hundreds of rogue planets - those worlds travelling without a star - which the telescope found drifting in Orion. Such planets are thought to be common, yet since they float alone in the darkness of space, we have rarely had the chance to see them before. Euclid also found thousands of stars scattered between the galaxies of far away clusters; stars which, like the rogue planets, have long since lost their homes.
Euclid will now go on with its primary task. The next set of data from the telescope, which should come in 2025, will offer its first insights into the dark side of our universe.
Starliner and Starship
Two new American spacecraft are scheduled to fly in the coming fortnight, though both could still face delays that push their lift-off further into the summer.
The first is Starliner, a capsule built by Boeing that should carry two astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing and NASA had hoped Starliner would lift off in mid-May, but a last minute abort and a series of technical issues delayed the launch. Engineers now seem confident that none of the remaining issues will prevent a safe flight, and so a new launch date of June 1 has been scheduled.
The other is Starship, which SpaceX is hoping will fly for the fourth time on June 5th. Last time it flew, back in March, Starship made it to space for the first time. Soon after, though, the spacecraft suffered control problems and then burned up in the atmosphere. This time SpaceX wants to see Starship survive the point of maximum heating during reentry. Success would mean the company is making good progress towards eventually landing and reusing the spacecraft.
Dear Alastair,
I've enjoyed your writing on space matters for many months now and I deeply appreciate the time and effort you put in.
I just read you mentioning that your personal life has been difficult. As a stranger, I can only wonder. Personally, I lost my father who was also my best friend late last year. While I have my wife and two young children to focus on and devotion on, it's still been difficult. Like many individual's experience of grief, there's little rhyme or reason to the exact spurts of pain and sadness I feel, with some days feeling almost normal and others a pit of darkness.
Anyway, once again thank you for the rich and enjoyable content Alastair. It is appreciated.
Daniel
Look for straight lines. Look for order in regions that should be chaotic. Look for movement in volumes that should be motionless. Enlist AI in these searches.