Solar Storm - Sunday 1st August 2010

The solar storm happened on Sunday 1st August ending a relatively extended quiet period on the sun The Coronal mass ejection ( CME ) which the storm created was picked up by the two SDS satellites. Solar Astronomers classed the event as C3 which is quite a small event the Plasma cloud took three days to travel the 94 million miles to Earth and produced auroral events ( Northern lights ) seen as far south as Germany, Sweden and parts of the Northern United states

A C3 event possesses no threat to either satellite or power grids but does pose a bio hazard to Astronauts carrying out Eva's

The August 1st CME was followed by a further 4 CME events all Earth bound
for anyone interested in monitoring such events The NOAA web site provides real time satellite solar information and can be found at:
NOAA

An explanation of exactly what a Coronal Mass Ejection is and how it forms can be found at the following wikipeidea site:

Wikipedia

Submitted by Peter Struve 6 August 2010

This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of a pair of colliding galaxies called the Antenna Galaxies. As the stars make up a tiny part of the volume of a galaxy there will be very few stellar collisions. But the dust and gas clouds are compressed to trigger a massive burst of star formation uualy in gian star clusters. The ultraviolet light from the very hottest stars excites the hydrogen gas to emit the hydrogen alpha line in the red part of the spectrum giving rise to what are called HII regions as they contain ionised hydrogen - that is hydrogen nuclei (protons) that have lost their electron. These are very prominent in the image.

Submitted by Robin Wilkey 7 August 2010