A real cosmic storm

When I was a kid, I absolutely loved the show Lost in Space.

Not only did I think the stories were exciting, there was the comic relief from Dr. Smith (overacted by Jonathan Harris) and the fact that I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson (played by Marta Kristen).  Now, with the perspective of time, I'm struck by how ridiculous most of the plots were, and also how fast and loose they played with science, even stuff that was known and understood at the time.  A few of the goofier ones:

• A comet making a close pass to the Jupiter 2, and Professor Robinson explaining how they'd be okay as long as they "didn't get too close to the comet's extreme heat and light"
• An episode where they ended up going faster than the speed of light because of "chemical impurities in the fuel," and the result was going back in time
• A character who was involved in an accident which damaged his heart, so the aliens removed his heart and replaced it with a lettuce heart, thereby turning him into a half-human, half-plant
• An alien who gets the Robot drunk by pouring tequila on his circuit boards

A recurring theme was the sudden appearance of a "cosmic storm."  What about them was "cosmic" was never explained, because usually all that happened is there was about forty-five seconds of wind, which blew around styrofoam rocks and stage props made of cardboard, and the Robot went around flailing his claws and shouting "Danger!  Danger!  A cosmic storm!"  Whatever these cosmic storms were supposed to be, they always heralded the appearance of one or more aliens, which included an extraterrestrial biker gang, a space cowboy, a magician (played by Al Lewis, best known for his depiction of Grandpa on The Munsters), a pirate (complete with an electronic parrot), a bunch of hillbillies (whose spacecraft looked like a wooden shack with a front porch), and in one extremely memorable episode, Brünhilde, who proceeded to yo-to-ho about the place, resplendent in a Viking helmet and riding a cosmic horse who unfortunately appeared to be made of plastic.

What's kind of a shame about all this is that the writers missed an opportunity (well, three seasons' worth of opportunities, really) to use actual science as a plot point.  Because there are cosmic storms, or at least something like them; they're called coronal mass ejections, and occur when a blob of plasma erupts off the surface of the Sun.  Small ones happen pretty much every day, but some of these things are freakin' huge, most notably the "Carrington Event" of 1859, which if it occurred today would have fried satellites and knocked out most of the world's power grid.  (As is, it caused sparking from telegraph lines that resulted in a number of fires.)

It turns out that even the Carrington Event is on the small side of what CMEs are capable of, judging by a paper last week in Nature Astronomy.  Scientists at the University of Colorado were studying a star called EK Draconis, which is rather like the Sun except much younger, and they saw it produce a CME that was ten times more powerful than anything we've ever seen the Sun do.  As it left the surface of the star, the burst of plasma was traveling well over a million kilometers an hour.

Any planet in the way would be in serious trouble.  Some scientists believe that a CME of that magnitude might be part of why Mars has such a thin atmosphere; a large CME aimed in its direction could well have stripped most of its atmosphere away.  

The question, of course, is, whether the Sun is capable of such an outburst.  The answer is "we're not sure, but probably."  Like I said, EK Draconis is fairly Sun-like; but it's far earlier along in its stellar evolution, and is more or less what the Sun looked like 4.5 billion years ago.  So its massive CME could be because it's in its turbulent youth, and the Sun has now settled down into comfortable middle age so it won't be quite so likely to blow plasma in our general direction.  But even so, the Carrington Event shows that the Sun is still capable of some serious pyrotechnics.  At present, there's no way to predict when they'll happen, or where on the Sun's surface; to do significant damage, the CME would have to be aimed toward the Earth.  We do know they're connected with the eleven-year sunspot cycle.  Solar flares and other surface disturbances are more common when sunspots are at their maximum (the next solar maximum is predicted to be in 2024).  But lots of sunspot cycle maximums come and go without any catastrophic CMEs, so there is still no sure way to predict the turbulence that precedes the storm.

The authors write:

Our findings can therefore provide a proxy for the possible enormous filament eruptions on young solar-type stars and the Sun, which would enable us to evaluate the effects on the ancient, young Solar System planets and the Earth, respectively.  Further, it is also speculated that stellar mass loss due to filament eruptions/CMEs can affect the evolutionary theory of stellar mass, angular momentum and luminosity more importantly than can stellar winds.  At present, frequency and statistical properties of CMEs on solar-type stars are unknown, but important insights into these factors will be obtained by increasing the number of samples in the future.

So I think we can all agree that this is much more impressive than Lost in Space-style cosmic storms, even without the alien Vikings and what-have-you.

It also highlights how powerful and unpredictable our universe can be.  On a calm, sunny day, it's easy to forget what a turbulent inferno the Sun actually is.  Me, I think it's a good idea when humans are reminded periodically that on the universal scale, we're really small.  There are potential disasters we can't predict or prevent -- CMEs being one example -- but maybe if we have impressed upon us how vulnerable we are, how dependent on our clement world, we'll finally start taking better care of what we have and averting the disasters we can prevent.

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I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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Sunspots and earthquakes

I'm going to start out with a quote from the brilliant Randall Munroe, whose comic strip xkcd is rightly beloved by science nerds and tech geeks the world over.  (Go into any college science building, and check out the professors' office doors.  You'll find as many xkcd comic strips as you did ones from The Far Side twenty years ago.)

The quote is:  "Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing, 'Look over there!'"

The reason this comes up is because of a recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports called, "On the Correlation Between Solar Activity and Large Earthquakes Worldwide."  The authors, Vito Marchitelli and Paolo Harabaglia (of the Università della Basilicata of Potenza, Italy), and Claudia Troise and Giuseppe De Natale (of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia of Naples) investigated a claim that was first made over a century and a half ago; that there is a connection between solar activity and earthquake frequency.

The first scientist who noticed this was the Swiss astronomer Rudolf Wolf, who also noted the 11.1 year cyclicity of sunspot frequency.  Sunspots are basically solar storms, regions where there is such a high concentration of magnetic flux lines that it inhibits convection and generates a region that is a little cooler and darker than the surrounding parts.  (A sunspot's darkness is relative; isolated from the rest of the bright disk of the Sun, a sunspot would have about the same luminosity as the full Moon, and would glow bright orange.)

Sunspots are also connected to some of the most violent activity our Sun engages in; solar flares, prominences, coronal loops, and coronal mass ejections.  Each of these is basically a different kind of enormous explosion on the Sun's surface, and results in a huge increase in the subatomic particle flux surging outward into the Solar System.  Our atmosphere protects us from some of that bombardment, but it's detectable on the Earth's surface not only with sensitive instruments but because it triggers the brilliant and gorgeous auroras near the poles.

It's not without its hazards, however.  Large events such as coronal mass ejections can damage or disable satellites, and because of the charged nature of the particles, can induce electrical activity in wires and potentially knock out the terrestrial electrical grid.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

But Marchitelli et al. found -- or, rather, confirmed Wolf's claim -- that there is a correlation between sunspot activity and earthquake frequency.  So how the hell could that work?

First, let's rule out that it's some kind of spurious correlation, such as the wonderful discovery by Tyler Vigen that per capita cheese consumption year-by-year correlates almost perfectly with the number of people who died from becoming tangled in their bedsheets.  Of course, you can correlate almost anything with anything else if you cherry-pick your data carefully enough; and there are statistical methods to catch out that sort of thing.  Here, an application of those statistical methods to the sunspot/earthquake correlation led to a vanishingly small -- less than 0.00001 -- chance that what they were looking at was not meaningful.

So what's going on here?  Turns out the likeliest explanation has to do with the induction of electrical activity I referenced earlier.  And this is where I had to stifle a chuckle.

If you read my piece "Vanished into the Wilderness" only a couple of days ago, you may remember that one of the goofy explanations proffered for unexplained disappearances of hikers is "the piezoelectric properties of granite."  Piezoelectricity is the property of certain substances to develop a charge if they're put under pressure; it's been thoroughly studied and in fact has a multitude of uses in technology, including push-start ignition on propane grills, the timekeeping device inside a quartz watch, and amplification pickups in electric guitars.

The key to how this could trigger earthquakes has to do with the fact that the piezoelectric effect works both ways; pressing on a piezoelectric substance induces a charge, and charging it induces a change in shape (altering the pressure).  So what Marchitelli et al. suspect is going on here is that the dramatic increase in charged particle flux striking the Earth during a peak time of sunspot activity is creating a piezoelectric change in the pressure of the rocks the particles are passing through -- generating a tension that makes it more likely for a stressed fault to rupture.

What's fun about all this is that not only do we have a correlation, but we have a possible mechanism explaining it.  That's often the problem; there might be odd correlations out there, but absent a plausible mechanism, chances are we're looking at something like Tyler Vigen's discovery that the number of letters in the winning word of the Scripps National Spelling Bee correlates with the number of people worldwide who are killed yearly by venomous spiders.  Here, we are looking at a meaningful correlation.

It also shows that we're being affected by forces of which the average person is entirely unaware.  Which is kind of cool but kind of scary.  It makes me wonder what other things are happening out there that are exerting influences on the world around us in strange and subtle ways.

For what it's worth, I still think that astrology, with all its alleged correspondences between the positions of the planets and stars and people's personalities and fates, is bunk.  And even if piezoelectricity might explain the connection between sunspots and earthquakes, I maintain that it doesn't have a damn thing to do with hikers disappearing.

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Humans have always looked up to the skies.  Art from millennia ago record the positions of the stars and planets -- and one-off astronomical events like comets, eclipses, and supernovas.

And our livelihoods were once tied to those observations.  Calendars based on star positions gave the ancient Egyptians the knowledge of when to expect the Nile River to flood, allowing them to prepare to utilize every drop of that precious water in a climate where rain was rare indeed.  When to plant, when to harvest, when to start storing food -- all were directed from above.

As Carl Sagan so evocatively put it, "It is no wonder that our ancestors worshiped the stars.  For we are their children."

In her new book The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars, scientist and author Jo Marchant looks at this connection through history, from the time of the Lascaux Cave Paintings to the building of Stonehenge to the medieval attempts to impose a "perfect" mathematics on the movement of heavenly objects to today's cutting edge astronomy and astrophysics.  In a journey through history and prehistory, she tells the very human story of our attempts to comprehend what is happening in the skies over our heads -- and how our mechanized lives today have disconnected us from this deep and fundamental understanding.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]