There's plenty of time to finish your soup.
What's the point of a worry? some rocks out there could do more damage, with unforeseen affects, like slowing down the Earth and what that would entail, or a damaging solar flare, or a nuclear winter...blah blah.

"Slumber, watcher, till the spheres,
Six and twenty thousand years
Have revolv'd, and I return
To the spot where now I burn.
Other stars anon shall rise
To the axis of the skies;
Stars that soothe and stars that bless
With a sweet forgetfulness:
Only when my round is o'er
Shall the past disturb thy door."

Yay Lovecraft. That's no flare, the old ones commeth!.

Gamma rays, X rays, Visible light, Infrared, Ultraviolet all travel at what we coin the speed of light. Those are electromagnetic frequencies, with Gamma and X ray being the highest frequencies, and infrared the lowest frequency.

So, when the probe captured the images, ALL of those frequencies were arriving here with the light you see in the image.

No need to cower in terror while waiting for some Gama rays on it's way to fry you, as when the flare happened and the light got here, so did the rest of the EM spectrum.

In other words: the electromagnetic energy part of the event is over with.

Now, just like the sun, you see the flare before the excited or ionized particles get here, because those particles travel much, much, MUCH slower than the speed of light.

How much slower? That's a good question, and is dependent on many things, but let us take a look at an example:

CME errupts from the sun and we see it. It took about 8 minutes for the light of that CME to get here.
However, if you've ever kept an eye on these types of solar events, you know that it can take a day, or even 2 days for the ionized particles that give us those beautiful northern lights to get here. Many are traveling at only 2 million miles per hour.

Let's say this explosion created some very high velocity ionized particles, and give them a velocity of about 10 million miles per hour.

We are 26,000 light years away from there. That is 1,456,000,000,000,000,000 or 1.456 x 10^18 miles away. At 10,000,000 Mph, it will take those particles 16,621,000 years to get here.

That's IF they survive not being absorbed by things in between here an there, like other stars, interstellar dust, etc, etc,.....and only if it was pointed in the right way because, let's face it folks, the solar system is not going to be sitting here in 16 millions years, but will be quite a ways down the road on it's path around the galaxy.....

Our atmosphere is supposed to block most celestial radiation, right?

But what if the arrival of such radiation coincides with a massive pole shift?

Originally posted by Suspiria
"Slumber, watcher, till the spheres,
Six and twenty thousand years
Have revolv'd, and I return
To the spot where now I burn.
Other stars anon shall rise
To the axis of the skies;
Stars that soothe and stars that bless
With a sweet forgetfulness:
Only when my round is o'er
Shall the past disturb thy door."

Yay Lovecraft. That's no flare, the old ones commeth!.

edit on 19-12-2012 by Suspiria because: (no reason given)

Excellent! Applause for me.

Originally posted by Atzil321
X-rays, gamma rays and visible light are all types of electromagnetic radiation Arken... They all travel at the same speed in a vacum.

edit on 19-12-2012 by Atzil321 because: (no reason given)

How do these effect our sun?

Thanks OP, I have my new desktop background!

Originally posted by unphased
The timing of this thread could not be more epic.

Truthfully, how many people thought "killshot" when they saw the thread tittle...? SMH I need to take an ATS fast..

Sorry, this is off topic... Déjà vu.

I swear i've seen that exact post....why oh why was it on this thread... now i'm getting paranoid!

Originally posted by Char-Lee

Originally posted by Atzil321
X-rays, gamma rays and visible light are all types of electromagnetic radiation Arken... They all travel at the same speed in a vacum.

edit on 19-12-2012 by Atzil321 because: (no reason given)

How do these effect our sun?

They don't.

Or rather they have about as much affect on our sun as your shining a flash light on a roaring fire in a fireplace.