Monday 21 November 2011

Seeing into the past

Have you ever thought about what's going on on the sun right at this very moment? Well fact is very few people do think about it it's a rather odd idea really to think about the sun other than the concept of 'is it sunny?' we tend to think of it as a constant bright ball in the sky that gives us heat and warmth. Yet the reality is its not as placid as you think. It's about as relaxed as a stroll though a lake of fire with no protective footwear while you get showered with hydrochloric acid. Now the issue with this is that there are things called solar storms, what are solar storms? Well they are storms on the chromosphere that cause the expulsion of electromagnetic radiation that is not only harmful to humans but also can knock out the entire electronic world throgh a electromagnetic pulse far more powerful than that caused by a nuclear detonation. The main issue with this is that there is no way to predict one of these storms. Even if we had a satellite positioned in orbit around the sun monitoring the suns activity the data would come to us after the radiation had already hit us because the electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light so with processing times we would know after we had observed it. So in that way we. Can only see the past and this effect gets more pronounced the further away you look.

So when you look up at the sky either at the stars or the sun remember that's not what's happening right now.

So remember nothing is quite what it seems.

DFTBA