Concern about a NASA video.

Can anyone explain to me why NASA would have this video on their website? Is this just a simulation or is this going to happen? Any input to ease my mind would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.



sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov...
Click on visualization and then Coronal Mass Ejection

It's happened frequently in the past and will happen in the future. You've already lived through a good 20-30 of them.

The graphics show the path of the particles... that doesn't mean that the actual mass of particles is a huge glowing cloud that's denser than pea-soup fog. The actual density of the particles isn't that great, and you can't visually tell when a CME is headed toward you/hitting Earth.

If you live in the northern latitudes, you'll notice some spectacular aurora borealis displays. There may be brief satellite outages and some cell phone outages. In unusual cases, you can even have power outages.

the ilustration of an coronal mass ejection from the sun is probably just that, an example of how it cold happen, hence the "three day warning" without an original. after all, it says "ilustrations"

Humans have been around for about 100,000 years so far, but only really been aware of the universe around us for about 100 years.

None of this stuff is new to Earth just new to our minds.

Also the earth is a cyclic thing. Some times the poles flip and these kind of coronal ejections have larger effects, some time we have an ice age, and some times asteroids hit us. This is just part of living on Earth and while it is new that we know this, these event have happend before.

Yes, these are natural disasters and people can and will die from some of them, but the same is true of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes etc.

Just hang on for the ride and see where you go. And in the end, over a long enough timeline MUCH shorter than the cosmic one for these events...everyone survival rate is 0%.

You are more likely to get creamed by a car on your way to work than killed by a solar mass ejection.

For an in depth study of current theory pertaining to our sun, see this months edition of National Geographic....an excellent read.

I'll tell you what's wrong with it... it's 44 seconds long, not 34 seconds long as it's posted.


As byrd pointed out, there has been a good chunk of them in the past...
Here's another link on them...
science.nasa.gov...