Excerpt
from Sunny Days by Jennifer Graham
When asked what their favorite part of the solar system is, most people will reply with Earth, Jupiter, Mars, or another planet. Very few will answer with our sun. When asked about our sun people often answer with friendly adjectives, describing the sun as a happy thing. While it is essential for our survival, the sun is not the calm yellow ball in picture books. It is a boiling ball of plasma, a million times bigger than the Earth with a magnetic field that is twisting itself into knots until the whole field breaks down. As the magnetic field destroys itself every 11 years, it produces conditions ripe for sunspots and flares. When magnetic energy builds up, occasionally the sun will eject part of itself during a flare. This solar material can move at speeds up to 1.5 million km/h, with as much energy as a billion-megaton nuclear bomb.
Thankfully Earth is not defenseless. We have our own magnetic field which deflects most of the ejected matter away from us, keeping our atmosphere and us safe. While it is getting pummeled, we earthlings get to enjoy the Auroras that result from the build up of energy.
“Does anyone have any questions for Dr. Elizabeth Williams about the sun?” Mrs. Sharon asked her grade 7 students, most of who hadn't even noticed that the presentation was over. After a short pause she turned to me and shook my hand. “Thank you so much for coming Doctor, it's always a treat to have a real scientist come to our class.”
While the class was applauding I gathered my presentation, thanked them for listening, and quietly made my exit. I'm a researcher at the Goddard Space Center, and when kids see that NASA logo on your presentation they tend to get excited, until they realize you aren't an astronaut. I mulled this over in my mind while I walked back to the center, eager to get back to my work.
“Miss me?” I called out to my partner in crime, and fellow researcher, Gary Hawthorn.
“It's been pretty quiet here. Nothing interesting across the board,” he replied without looking up. Glancing at his screen I saw he was watching one of the current active regions of the sun, which featured a number of strong sunspots, and what looked like the beginning of a solar prominence.
“How long has that been there?” I said pointing to the small arch of solar material.
“Hmm, not long?” Gary switched to the archive images we stored and flipped through the most recent ones. “Looks like it's only been there a couple of hours. Might be a good one yet!”
I reached over to his keyboard and brought up the image of the sun again, looking it over. Spots and prominences are nice for some of the researchers here, but our work didn't start until those arches break and come sailing our way. However you can't tell by looking if a prominence might turn into a flare until right before it happens. Even our best equipment only gives us a little extra warning, which is why most of our instruments are constantly recording.
I swatted Gary and said “Come on, we have a status report to give.” and grabbed my files. The head of our department liked to have updates every week or two, so that when her boss wanted a report of our progress, she'd have more than a vague idea of what we were doing.
The difference between administrator offices and researcher offices never ceases to amaze me. Our office is the definition of organized chaos. We know where everything is, but God help us if someone else had to find something. Dr. Amy Driedzic's office on the other hand looked like it came out of a catalog, and screamed, 'I'm an important administrator'. Luckily Dr. Driedzic herself was more down to earth, and these regular status reports weren't too much of a chore. While she didn't start off as a sun researcher herself, she is a PhD in astrophysics and knows what we're talking about.
We all shook hands and I handed her a copy of our latest briefing. We sat down and after the required pleasantries, I started to explain why we were here giving another report only one day after our last report.
“As you know we're in another solar maximum, the time during the solar cycle when sunspots are most numerous, so all this increased activity is to be expected. However, over the last few days we've noticed a dramatic increase in the number of prominences being formed in the high activity areas. An unpredicted increase.” At the word unpredicted Dr. Driedzic's eyebrows shot up. We may not know much of the whys of the sun, but we have its cycles fairly well mapped.
I went through all the numbers, with Gary jumping in on occasion to provide additional theories. Dr. Driedzic was evidently intrigued by all this, canceling her next appointment so we could keep going over information with her. We were close to cluing up when I felt my beeper vibrating, and at the same time Gary was grabbing his pocket - his was going off as well. The only thing we used them for was to keep tabs on what data is coming into the lab, and only if something major was going on.
Explaining this to Dr. Driedzic, we all took off towards our lab. Passing other offices we could see that the whole wing was frantic. Something major was happening.